Bread and Circuses

I don't particularly enjoy writing or talking about politics. I used to. I used to spend way too much time arguing about policies and presidents and the minutiae of domestic political drama. I probably owe a lot of friends apologies for things I said online in the quest to prove them wrong. I relished arguing online about debates and scoring personal points in the form of "likes" and "hearts" - it felt good!

Politics is full of villains to boo and heroes to cheer on. It's sophisticated professional wrestling. In some ways its even better than wrestling because people think you're smart if you know a lot about what is happening in politics - sadly nobody thinks you're smart if you know all about what is happening in wrestling.

Humans will always engage in and derive enjoyment from petty politics that don't matter. Politics is a team sport and humans are tribal creatures. We get the same enjoyment out of hating the opposing political party that we get from hating a rival sports team.

But I stopped enjoying the game when I came to realize that the entertainment aspect of politics is there specifically so that we can focus on the show and ignore the parts of politics that are affecting the lives of millions, particularly people who do not live in the states and can have no potential say in what happens.

By keeping us entertained by hating the people who vote differently than us the embedded powers can smoothly continue making a profit without our getting too concerned.

I thought that I could just ignore politics and focus on cultivating my little garden; being a good parent, serving as PTA president, being the best teacher and colleague I could be, those were how I would serve. The hell with the rest of the world!

I've changed my tune. I can't completely ignore politics since my tax dollars are helping to fund things that I morally find repugnant.

So how do I stay engaged in politics without getting sucked into the showmanship of politics? I think the right way is to focus on the single most important issue.

War - What is it good for?

The only issue that I care about is war and our country's continued drive to expand the insatiable war machine. Every issue that takes up our news cycle pales in comparison in importance and is deliberately fostered by our media to distract us.

Whether you're a self described liberal or conservative, war should be the single most important issue that concerns you. War makes everything worse for everyone except for those people who continue to drive the war machine from behind the scenes.

I am certainly not an expert in every single political issue. But you don't have to be an expert if you just use war as your proxy for all other issues.

Left or right war affects every single issue that people both on the left and right care about.

There are forces at play that profit enormously from war. The military industrial complex requires continual military incursions in order to continue to drive profits.

The only thing that matters in terms of who we elect is how effectively can they place the breaks on the never ending pressure to go forward with war. The constitution says that only Congress may declare war. That constitutional check on power has been basically circumvented since the 1940s since the commander in chief simply engages in military operations instead of war. This means that the single most important thing a president does or does not do is decide whether to engage our armed forces in military conflict.

Let's look at some of the main issues that both the left and the right care about and see how war is either the ultimate cause, or the greatest exacerbator, of those issues.

Women's issues:

War kills lots and lots of women. If you care about women's health and women's right to choose then you should care about the issue that affects over 600 million women and girls. This is an increase of over 50% from a decade ago. according to the UN. War will always hit the most vulnerable people the hardest so whatever marginalized group most concerns you they are likely going to be the one most effected by war.

When we add into the mix the prevalence of horrific sexual assault during war it is no wonder that it has been said "‘It is perhaps more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict."

Environmental issues:

If you care about climate change and are concerned about the damage done by greenhouse gas emissions then war should concern you. It is estimated that the world output of carbon emissions is over 6 billion tons annually. None of the emissions of war are counted in any of our climate models. So whatever our models predict about the role anthropogenic carbon emissions play in climate change we are vastly undercounting our total output because we do not count the largest short term emitter of carbon, methane and other toxic gases.

War also significantly contributes to biodiversity losses as species in theaters of war are just one of the many casualties of conflict. The complete destruction and transformation of landscapes will inevitably mean that even the populations that survive the immediate aftermath of war will struggle to survive in the decades to come.

War affects the issues that conservatives care about the most also.

Government spending:

According to the US Debt Clock - the national debt is over 35 trillion dollars in debt. My children's share of that debt is over $100,000 at the moment.

The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq cost an estimated 8 trillion dollars and killed a million people (I think this is a vast underestimate though).

We could have significantly less debt if we didn't go to war. We could have healthcare for everyone, along with free pre-k for all and massive amounts of loan forgiveness if we hadn't spent that kind of money on the wars of the last two decades.

We spend a staggering amount of money on war! The pentagon has failed six audits in a row attempting to figure out just how much money we are spending and where those trillions of dollars are going!

But the wars are only part of the story. even if we didn't engage in a single military incursion in the world we would still have to pay to maintain and upgrade our 800 military bases around the world. Do we have 800 military bases around the world because the world is unsafe or is this an effort to impose hegemony upon the world regardless of the cost?

Immigration:

Over 1% of the worlds population has been forcibly displaced or ethnically cleansed due to war. This is more than double the rate from 1990. So if illegal immigration is a concern of yours then you should be particularly eager to limit war. If you believe that crime has increased due to increased illegal immigration then you should care deeply about curtailing wars so that countries can remain stable and people are not strongly incentivized to come to the United States.

Panem et circenses 

So long as the masses were entertained and fed they would allow the government to do whatever they wanted. That distraction was sufficient to allow Rome to transform itself from a free Roman Republic to an autocratic empire. Some things have not apparently changed.

All of the "culture war" in America is ultimately a modern day form of Bread and Circuses. By keeping Americans divided and engaged in a heated argument so that we can focus on blaming our fellow citizens for the problems we perceive and, in so doing, ignore the culpability of the politicians and corporate interests that are fomenting the problems.

All of our bitterness towards our fellow citizens is about as important as the feud between the NWO Hollywood (white) and the NWO Wolfpac (red) - entertaining but ultimately staged by people who want to keep us from pointing out that this is fake.

The only thing that matters is how much of a slowdown we can put on the inevitable effort of corporate interests for the never ending pursuit of profit that war can generate.

Our cult of personality obsession clouds us to the reality of how much they do when it comes to domestic policy is identical regardless of political party. We seem to have forgotten that our border wall project didn't begin with Trump it began under Clinton in 1995 and Obama was once called the "Deporter in chief" and Kamala Harris has talked in her plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a border wall.

The more I see when I grasp what the US empire does to keep us content and flooded with cheap goods and entertainment the more I realize that almost all of our domestic political concerns are, at best, a distraction.

I don't care how you vote. I won't make your vote a moral issue because I don't believe that one human being running for the highest office in the land is trying to "save us" and the other is trying to "destroy us". Ultimately I don't think whomever we elect can even curtail the war machine. But to the extent anything we do matters it would make sense to look beyond people's words and look at how much they promoted or hindered the goals of the war machine.

I don't care how eloquent a speaker a politician is or is not. I don't care how strong the emotions are around a particular issue. All I care about is the extent to which war is advanced or hindered. Everything else is bread and circuses.