Decades ago, I was in a rock bar in a working class suburb of Detroit. It was February 22, 1980, the U.S. Olympic hockey team was playing the Russian hockey team in a medal round of the International Olympics.
As the young U.S. team closed-in on an unlikely victory over the overwhelmingly favored Russian national team, young 20-somethings gathered around a T.V. which competed against a rock band, a former symbol of rebellion, not 15 yards away. The young 20-somethings, who a decade earlier might have been protesting the Vietnam war, broke into a chant “USA, USA, USA . . . . “: for me, part of rock n’ roll died that evening.
By that time we had gone through the peace movements of the 60s and early 70s, through the stale latter portion of the 70s’ decade–during which rock music remained amazing: though less meaningful. Eleven months after that evening, Ronald Reagan was sworn into office and the nation’s zeitgeist began its transformation towards militarism.
On a personal level Reagan was likable enough, his policies, in my view, were not. But we’ll avoid judgment of the man and rather focus on the militaristic movement which accelerated under Reagan. The U.S. military budget which stood just shy of $144 billion during 1980, by 1986 more than doubled to $295.5 billion. By 1988, Reagan’s final year in office, the military budget had risen to nearly $310 billion. The march towards militarism began and young people traded daily wardrobes of faded jeans and peace signs for military fatigues and running shoes. The Nation has not looked back.
The brazen nationalism of that evening was horrifying and portended the dark path we have subsequently journeyed. The transformation of the nation’s consciousness towards greater violence and war has been accomplished by both commercial interests, and also those who authentically believe war, the force of arms, domination, are all necessary to survive in this world, and if not for survival, then an acceptable means to attain a political end.
This, unsurprisingly, coincided with the transition to the neoliberal economic agenda, a purer form of the capitalist order which has at its foundation a belief in competition and self-interests as the driving forces of progress. The emphasis on competition and self-interest released the restraint on violence and enabled our spiral into the dark worlds of torture, collateral damage, and war. For 40 years, we’ve watched the National Rifle Association (NRA), competitive sports, and violent entertainments grow in influence and increasingly fill our pastimes. Violence saturates our entertainment, our recreation, our psyches, our souls. Now we stand in preparation for major wars with nuclear armed opponents, projected likely to occur within the decade, and we seem resigned, or rather conditioned, to this fate.
The belief in force and violence has overwhelmed our social consciousness, we barely acknowledge the possibility of peace; we fail to give audience to the peace message. Yet, there are those who see the wrongness of this path, who see the contradiction to our humanitarian and religious traditions, who believe in the possibility of peace. Peace is a choice.
War is inevitable only to the extent those who resign themselves to war remain the dominant force within our society. The peacemakers, along with the libertarians who generally oppose war, must rise, give hope to others, and increase the numbers of those who will oppose war, in order to prevent our otherwise likely fate of nuclear war–we must speak out for peace.
To be clear, this is not an attack on the soldier, or soldiers, most of whom likely joined the war movement out of an authentic commitment to an ideal, this is an attack on the ideology of war. There are others whose lives are so saturated in thoughts of violence, they can only see solutions through the lens of war. This is an attack on that state of consciousness.
We should be strengthened in the knowledge that there are those in other nations: China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere, who also desire peace, and who see the folly of the world’s current path. A strengthened anti-war movement within the U.S. could provide space for anti-war movements in other nations, as nations compete in the realm of public relations.
Now is time for the peacemakers, the libertarians, and others, to undo the merger between violence and our collective consciousness and to point the world in a new direction, away from war: for humanity, and for the soldier.