Veterans' Day
Nov. 11th, 2014 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogEver since my visit to Washington DC, Veterans' Day makes me think of Arlington National Cemetery and some of the still and beautiful landscapes there. This is my favorite of my photographs from the grounds.
Seeing the staggering number of graves at Arlington served to help quantify the damage and destruction wrought on countless lives, families, and nations by armed conflict at the national and international scale. Justified wars are few and far between, and it's been a very long time since the United States engaged in a conflict that I feel able to informedly support the decision to enter into. Even those, like World War II, have been twisted into justification to pursue lines of domestic and foreign policy that are deeply flawed, such as the vast military build-up during the containment policy of the Cold War, or the solidification of the military-industrial complex as economic backbone.
I really feel that we, as a species, have the potential to end the kind of conflict that produces scenes like these endless rows of buried, lifeless bodies who gave all in brave service to leaders, some foreign and some our very own, who failed in their obligation to seek peace.
Seeing the staggering number of graves at Arlington served to help quantify the damage and destruction wrought on countless lives, families, and nations by armed conflict at the national and international scale. Justified wars are few and far between, and it's been a very long time since the United States engaged in a conflict that I feel able to informedly support the decision to enter into. Even those, like World War II, have been twisted into justification to pursue lines of domestic and foreign policy that are deeply flawed, such as the vast military build-up during the containment policy of the Cold War, or the solidification of the military-industrial complex as economic backbone.
I really feel that we, as a species, have the potential to end the kind of conflict that produces scenes like these endless rows of buried, lifeless bodies who gave all in brave service to leaders, some foreign and some our very own, who failed in their obligation to seek peace.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
-- United States General and President Dwight D Eisenhower
