Living in constant fear as a Nation [View all]

[uawchild]

As a very new poster here on DU, one of the first forums that caught my attention has been the Latest Breaking News section. Its eye-catching placement and topical discussions made it the "go to" place for me to read, reply to posts and even start a few new threads of my own. It's a lot of fun and I have been enjoying participating there greatly.

The thing is I started to notice how many posts were war and conflict oriented. Yes, of course I realize that IS what much of our media dishes out as breaking news and its natural and right that people will want to comment on these issues. But, man, it started to seem to me that a disproportionate amount of the news in the general media is just designed to stoke fear, war monger and drive, well, what seems to be an over-the-top level of militaristic propaganda.

We hear it all the time, we need to beef up our military, enlarge the army, build more ships. Global terrorists, a militarily resurgent Russia and Chinese air bases on man-made islands are all coming to get us. So we must prepare, take more money away from social programs, buy more weapons.

I started to spend more and more of my posting time saying no, things aren't that bad, no, the world isn't really going up in flames, no, the Russkies are not out to destroy NATO despite what Marco Rubio said. lol Sorry, Marco Rubio makes me laugh, back to my point...

And how unprepared are we in actuality to warrant this barrage of fear mongering by our media outlets?

Well, we only spend as much money on defense as the next NINE nations in the world combined. This is why I personally don't buy into all the fear mongering and constant war hype:



"The U.S. outpaces all other nations in military expenditures. World military spending totaled more than $1.7 trillion in 2013. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total.

U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next nine largest military budgets around the world, combined.

U.S. military spending dwarfs the budget of the #2 country – China. For every dollar China spends on its military, the U.S. pends $3.60."

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/

Well, I don't expect that this post will stop the media from fanning fears. lol Or even that people here on DU will pay into the media hype a little less. But maybe the level of advocacy for more arms, more military actions will lessen just slightly while we discuss the news of the day here.

Thanks for reading this, it was cathartic for me to post it. lol