Blue Angels Blues

June 24, 2016

The Navy's Blue Angels will be in town in a few days. Most people are excited about it; some have the Blue Angels blues.

Our local Veterans for Peace organization, comprised of honorable men and women who served in the military, is leading a small but vocal group insisting that the Blue Angels fly on by us and go someplace else. (Full disclosure: They were nice enough to ask me to speak to their group some years ago.) Their concerns are not ill-founded nor untrue.

Some veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or other combatrelated emotional stressors, certainly are traumatized by military demonstrations, especially if they are loud. They can suffer equally from firecrackers, fireworks and, occasionally, thunder.

According to research by the Rand Corporation, some 20 percent of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or major depression. That doesn't even include the Vietnam vets still dealing with the same issues. There is nothing insignificant about it.

The noise made by the Blue Angels is also of concern to many non-vets and pet owners. (Anyone attending the air show should use some kind of protection for their ears and those of small children, whose hearing can be permanently damaged by this level of noise.)

It is easy to agree with the protesters but, respectfully, there is a bigger issue at play here.

We have become a country that has accepted, without much resistance, a state of perpetual war. We’ve been in Afghanistan 15 years and Iraq 13, with no end in sight. The military-industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned us on his way out of office has grown so large and powerful it can no longer be managed.

It’s easy to see why.

We’re fighting the two longest wars in our history without having been asked to contribute anything at all. There has been no tax increase to pay the trillion dollar-plus price tag, no requests to save anything for the war effort, no draft to trouble us. The men and women in the military and their families carry the entire burden; the rest of us applaud when they’re introduced at a ball game.

Excluding embassy guards, we have troops stationed in more than 100 countries. We’re the No. 1 arms dealer in the world; Saudi Arabia is our best customer.

Defense contractors have operations in every state, so senators and representatives are quick to oppose any reductions in defense spending. That mindset leads directly to the $1 trillion F-35 fighter still awaiting its first combat test and which will not be fully delivered until 2040, not to mention the latest multi-billion dollar destroyers and submarines.

Our politicians have decided we must stay in the Middle East until we "win," though no one can define what that victory might look like. Our enemy is a group who has created a new religion, a bastardized version of Islam in which killing anyone who disagrees with it is its first commandment.

This group’s vile offspring now operate in more than three dozen countries. We helped birth these monsters when we decided to invade Iraq, and the dominoes that fell did not usher in an era of democratic reform as we were told, but an era of destabilized anarchy and violence.

The irony here is that none of these groups of butchers pose any real threat to the security of the United States. Yes, their acolytes can and do occasionally unleash murderous rampages. But tragic as those outrages are, they do not threaten the security of the entire country. There isn’t going to be an ISIL invasion, whether we stay in the Middle East or not.

We fight these wars not because we must but because we can. These wars provide jobs in every state, our arms deals provide income for the government, and it all provides campaign contributions and votes for politicians.

We accept the need for a military because of the lunatics and megalomaniacs in the world we can’t trust. Nobody wants a weak military. Since we’ve decided our military should be an all-volunteer operation, that pretty much requires aggressive recruiting. The Blue Angels are a recruiting tool of the highest order.

Their appearance will be welcomed by most and dreaded by others. But they are just a little part of bigger questions: Why are we always at war? Who decided this was a good idea? Why have we accepted it?

On balance, maybe it’s better to have the Blue Angels here, troubling though they are to some, but beautifully painted and gleaming in the sun at an air show. The alternative is their F-18s bristling with weaponry and killing people in far-off places that mean little to our true national interests.