Come over to the Dark Side, Obama … I am your father. OK, clearly I’m not Barack’s father, but the next petition that could come across his official’s desk could have Sith-like implications. The chance to vote for a petition has been posted on the White House website for a Death Star is ending soon. Yes, you heard that right, my young Padawans, a fully functioning Death Star. And personally I think this is a great idea. Who in their right mind would mess with a country that has a fricking Death Star?! Nobody. That’s who.
If Mitt Romney were elected, we could have had him allocate those extra $2 trillion of military funds to kick-start the Death Star program, maybe start building some hyper-intelligent droids while we’re at it. But this fantasy might not be too far out of reach for the United States. Kind of.
The truth is that the United States dwarfs all countries in military spending. We spend roughly $695.7 billion per year. China is in second spending roughly a fifth of that. Then comes Japan, which only spends a tenth of what we do.
There is no doubt that we like to flex our military. As Americans we love that we could go toe-to-toe with any military in the world and bury them. So it would only make complete sense that we build such a massive piece of metal, adding the Death Star to our trophy case of military prowess. Think of how cool it will be when we fry our next terrorist threat from outside of Earth’s orbit.
Who are we kidding? This whole thing is a joke — the petition, the Death Star and the way we think about our military.
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It is that mentality that needs to change. It’s that mentality that has cost American lives and the lives of many other innocent people. America is no stranger to war crimes. We are no strangers to genocide (Native Americans), no stranger to concentration camps (the Japanese internment camps). We have gotten ourselves entangled in the affairs of others. We went to Iraq for oil and told them, “Hey, your style of government isn’t good enough for us, please let us force our opinions on you.” We still torture. We ignore the Constitution and go to war without a declaration signed by Congress.
What morals do we stick to? We keep putting billions into our military budget to police the world. Not to mention the economic effect. We should have heeded the warning from James Madison.
He warned that liberty is threatened during war time: “War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
We need to flip the script. I’m not arguing for isolationism, but we need to pick and choose our battles. And right now we are spreading ourselves thin, and it is jeopardizing our freedom and our safety. According to the Department of Defense, the U.S. military is deployed in more than 150 countries around the world, with 196,248 of its 1,414,149 active-duty personnel serving outside the United States, as of Dec. 31, 2011. Since the War on Terror, we have become less safe and less free. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were likely “blowback,” a term the CIA uses to describe unintended consequences of undercover operations that the public does not know about. So when Americans see the attacks they think to themselves, “Why do they hate us?”
As we speak, tons of anti-American groups are popping up. They don’t hate us because we are free. Canada is free. Switzerland is free. What if we wake up and realize that war is almost always started on lies and built on war propaganda? If we are the leaders of the free world then why aren’t we leading by example?
Sure, the Death Star is a probably a hoax, but is the idea that big of a stretch in the century? It fits right in with our current foreign policy.
However, if we must police the world, this time let’s not leave a little hole big enough for a laser to get through and blow up the entire station — this seems like a major design flaw to me. We should hire a different architect.
Brian is a junior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected].
