Meander

Two articles for Remembrance Day, both about former soldiers.

• The only surviving UK WWI vet doesn’t attend Remembrance Day ceremonies because they glorify war.
• A letter from former American Army Ranger Kevin Tillman about his brother Pat.

NATO, including Canada, has been in Afghanistan for seven years. What have the results been?

• 133 Canadian soldiers killed. 1513 NATO troops killed. People killed 20,119. Two UK soldiers were killed on Saturday.
• Afghanistan’s army is not becoming the guardian of safety and freedom that it has been trumpeted as.
• Afghanistan’s election scamming president is pointing out, correctly, that military force is not going to bring peace to Afghanistan.
• And commentators are still pretending that we should waste the lives of our soldiers because we’ve already wasted the lives of so many soldiers and we can’t admit that it was wrong.

Leading up to Remembrance Day, this blog will be hosting a mini-series about current wars and current effects of wars and armies. The goal is to give a sense of how widespread wars are today and the wide variety of suffering that they cause. Today’s articles are about:

• 20,000 Japanese protesting the U.S. military base on Okinawa. The U.S. has over 700 military bases on foreign soil, spanning over 120 countries.
• Hezbollah is rearming in preparation for a widely expected Israeli offensive in Lebanon this winter or spring. Israel is expected to attack Lebanon before attacking the Iranian nuclear program in order to stop Hezbollah, an ally of Iran’s,  from firing rockets into northern Israel.
• A civil war is expanding in Yemen. And the Yemeni government is now planning to build a nuclear power plant, which will likely have a destabilizing effect.

There’s an old argument that guns make us safer because law abiding citizens can use them to stop crimes. It’s a hard argument to refute, even with the data on your side, because most of us watch movies and television shows where people with guns stop other people with guns. The reality is that it’s difficult to stop someone with a gun, even if you have a gun. That’s why the news today is telling us about a U.S. army major who shot 46 people, killing 13 of them, on an army base in Texas. There are plenty of guns on army bases and plenty of people who are well trained to use them, but that wasn’t enough to stop this tragedy.

Research in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine estimates that 50% of American children and 90% of black American children will use food stamps during their childhood, in part due to the current economic problems in the U.S. Those are big numbers.