““When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.””
— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via i-contain-multitudes)
The problem isn’t that “the country is divided” the problem is the increasing acceptance of fascism as a legitimate political position. Framing it as a problem of division puts those who want to kill the poor, LGBT people, and poc on equal moral footing with those who would like not to die.
Currently, there are 196 nations on Earth and one of those 196 nations is the United States of America. Now, the United States of America has only been around, a bit over, 200 years and the U.S. is roughly 4% of the world’s population - but it happens to be the worlds largest arms dealer.
This one country, the United States of America, controls 31% of the global weapons market. In 2011, the U.S. Sold 66 billion dollars in weapons to other nations around the world. The U.S. supplies 94 other nations with the weapons that their militaries use.
The U.S. supplies almost half of the other nations in the world with their weapons.
The U.S. spends somewhere around 612 billion dollars a year on defense. The 2nd highest spending nation in the world is Russia, which spends 76 billion. The U.S. spends 612 billion a year. Russia, at #2, spends 76 billion.
The U.S. spends more than the next 10 countries combined.
One example: there are 31 aircraft carriers in the world. The U.S. has 19 of them. The other 12 aircraft carriers are operated and owned by the rest of the world combined.
Now, a number of nations that have militaries, have military bases in their nation to defend them, protect them, and keep them safe. There are few nations that have military bases not on their own soil but in other countries. Russia has 8 military bases in other countries. Great Britain has 7 military bases in other countries. France has 5 military bases in other countries.
Russia has 8.
England has 7.
France has 5.
The United States has 662 military bases in other countries.
In fact, that’s a conservative estimate. Others have said that the number is probably closer to 800 military bases in other countries (38 countries, in fact). 95% of foreign bases, owned and operated in the world, are owned and operated by the United States of America. That’s more bases than any other nation, country, or empire, in the history of the world.
The U.S. sells more weapons, makes more weapons, owns more weapons, brokers in more weapons, spends more money on its own defense than any nation has ever spent in the history of the world.
And there are people running right now for president, who when asked, if they were elected president, what their first priority would be, say, the first thing they’d do is strengthen the military.
- Rob Bell, RobCast | Politics & Guns pt. 4 (via ramsesprashad)
