Can We Just Not?
I want to spend less on war and more on good things
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I woke up this morning with an email from the New York Times in my inbox:
“Breaking News: U.S. Captures Venezuelan Leader, Trump Says”
I am no longer a Times subscriber and have spent the last few years strategically unsubscribing to email lists, whether of news or commerce. I find that the more that I can focus on the messages that I actually want to receive from people that I choose to hear from, the happier and less distracted that I feel.
Still, somehow this message seemed to get through. And I opened it sometime around 5:30am this morning.
The email continues:
“President Trump announced that U.S. forces had carried out ‘a large scale strike against Venezuela’ and were flying President Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of the country.”
It then includes a link to follow for live updates, and then it has an ad for some kind of corn hulling gadget that looks like complete gibberish. Seriously.
Here’s a screenshot:
Let’s set aside the bizarre ad, even though there is a lot to dig into there (from the questions of the use of generative AI in advertising, to the question of what is even being sold, to the point that the New York Times has fallen so far that what would have once been a coveted ad placement for a major brand is now being sold to what appears to be “Consumerbags.”). The ad is part of the reason our world is so dystopian now, but it’s not the biggest problem at the moment.
For months now, the U.S. has been firing on small boats off the coast of Venezuela, murdering the occupants without citing any evidence as to their wrongdoing. There have been more than 30 such strikes since September, killing at least 110 people.
Now, we have invaded another country and captured their leader, while also apparently launching an attack on the country. I felt nauseous.
I’m not that informed about Venezuela. I don’t know much about Maduro. But I feel like we’ve been here before.
This is all eerily reminiscent of the Iraq war and the rhetoric around Saddam Hussein, except this time it feels like there’s even less of an attempt to make a public case for these attacks. We don’t live in the same information environment that we did 20 years ago. Bush only moved when he felt like he had enough public support on his side. Trump just does stuff, whether or not any case has been made.
When I saw the NYT email, my first impulse was to do more reading, but I wasn’t sure where to go. Most news sites like NYT and Washington Post are behind paywalls now. I scrolled the Apple News app a bit, which gave me some updates from WaPo for free, but then I did what I’ve been trained to do for two decades when news breaks: I scrolled social media.
My Instagram feed this morning had one or two social activist accounts that I follow which were amplifying the Venezuela news, but then I quickly got lost in the scroll of nonsense videos, none of which had anything to do with world events.
I haven’t been on Twitter/X in years, although reading the latest from Parker Molloy about how Grok (Elon Musk’s AI platform) is basically generating child pornography from publicly available photos on demand, I’m glad I’m not on there.
The point is, we know less and less about what’s actually happening in the world, and there are simply less journalists with increasingly smaller spotlights to try to hold power to account. So if you’re the president, why not kidnap another country’s president I guess? I’m being facetious, but who’s actually going to do anything to stop this? What does public pressure actually look like now?
There’s a lot we don’t know at this point. Here’s a few of the things that I do know:
Health insurance costs are skyrocketing because the ACA subsidies lapsed
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down last year because of funding cuts, which will reduce the impact of PBS and NPR
The U.S. is deporting huge amounts of people, sending some to a “prison” that looks more like a concentration camp in El Salvador
Gaza continues to be bombed by Israel, backed by American funding, despite a supposed ceasefire deal
I pay taxes. I vote in elections. I should have a say in how my money gets spent. We all should.
I lived through decades of endless war in Iraq on the false premise that another country’s leader was harboring terrorists and had weapons of mass destruction. I did work with veterans who were permanently injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve seen the real, human toll that war takes on these soldiers and their families.
I don’t want a fight in Venezuela. I don’t want to keep spending money on our military while Americans are food and housing insecure right here.
I want to spend money on education, on public transportation, on making our world just a little better, a little brighter. Clean energy. Food and housing as human rights.
There will be more to learn over the coming days and weeks, but I am waking up this morning and feeling the need to speak out. Because this isn’t right.
I hope you all will join me in condemning what you’re seeing and asking for some accountability.
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I felt nauseous too brother... This is absolutely not right, and I'm unfortunately feeling quite powerless these days to effect change in a more productive and wholistic direction. As the cliche goes, "I'm just trying to pay the bills". I'm hoping this hyper aggressive, unreasonable and undiplomatic tone from the white house can simmer down very soon.