Yesterday 22 veterans killed themselves.
Would you please pass the butter?
Today 22 veterans will kill themselves.
What do you think of the Dallas Cowboys?
Tomorrow 22 veterans kill themselves.
What is the weather supposed to be?
The day after tomorrow 22 veterans will kill themselves.
This is beginning to sound redundant.
Let’s try something different.
We had another mass shooting.
Are you coming to my birthday party?
Between 1955 and 1975, the Vietnam War killed over 58,000 American soldiers – less than the number of civilians killed with guns in the U.S. in an average two-year period.
In the first seven years of the U.S.-Iraq War, over 4,400 American soldiers were killed. Almost as many civilians are killed with guns in the U.S. every seven weeks. https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-deaths-and-injuries-statistics/
Most of the 30,000-gun deaths in this country are suicide, almost 19,000 annually. Yes, we pray for and have generous kind thoughts of for those who are killed in senseless mass shootings as we should. But we are a nation that has never come to terms with its senseless violence committed against civilian populations around the world.
This nation slaughtered the original inhabitants, enslaved its workforce and their descendants, terrorized the generations that followed. We tolerated and applauded lynching of vulnerable citizens. We were built on exploitation and murder.
Our endless wars are…, endless and senseless. The bomb precisely hits the target. The shrapnel hits the wedding celebration nearby, killing the family or others who are hunkered down trying to survive a civil uprising.
Somehow, we are supposed to make us feel safer at home. Our military assaults nations that do not acknowledge our greatness. We do so in the name of manifest destiny, stopping communism and bringing down dictatorships or keeping peace in the region. We enjoy killing people. Most time it never even makes the news.
President John F. Kennedy said that: ‘mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.’
During the height of the Vietnam war Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King noted that it costs $500,000 to kill one Vietcong soldier while we spend at that time $53 to fight poverty.
Imagine the relative costs today after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and all the continuous covert hostilities which never make the news.
Jesus said: ‘Put up again your sword in your place: for all that take up the sword shall perish with the sword.’ Matthew 26:52
We will continue to perish by the sword because we relish the power it brings us to kill others without consequence. Or at least, we don’t think so.
Galatians 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.