Post #5 Make Love Not War

      

     WAR! HUH! What is it good for? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Well not exactly. War is a large part of what makes our country and others what it is today. It is messy and a bittersweet event in the history of sovereign unions so what is war good for? Money. According to USA Today “ Total arms sales among the world’s 100 largest defense contractors topped $398 billion in 2017 after climbing for the third consecutive year” and you know who is at the top of that list behind Russia? The Good’ ol US of A. That’s right, the United States is the world’s largest defense spender by a wide margin and of the world’s top 10 defense contractors, five of them are located in the USA. If American citizens knew how much of our money goes into killing people, destroying countries, and ransack all of the resources from the country attacked you better believe they would have something to say about it that would go against the grain of the of the people in power’s agenda. Well this opposition is not good for their already hefty wallets so what do the people at the top do? They suppress those voices by any means necessary. Politicians that have stock in these companies and they obtain more money every time we go to war so they lobby for conflict to happen in the hopes they can add a few more zeros to the end of their checking account.

      The sheer magnitude of the expenses makes it difficult to comprehend. Secrecy, inaccurate accounting, and the postponement of present expenditures further limit public comprehension of the fiscal costs of war, this seems like news the American public should know so why isn’t this information more readily available? We can blame the media for this one because there is virtually no dissent from this topic for the reason of views. We as American people place a lot of trust and emphasis on the media so in essence “what ever they say goes” and the only way to hold that power is with eye catching headlines for views. The media will do what ever it takes to get eyes on there product and war is the perfect eye catching subject that they look for because lets be honest, war is more interesting than no war. Overall, America has gotten away from the media of old where you were given the information and you got to make your decision on how you felt about it; now we are given and opinion and are searching for the truth about it. Money talks and where it is loud the media will follow, the only way we will find opposing views of war is if we going looking for it ourselves.