My Name Is The U. S. Government...And I'm a Gadget-aholic

I admit to being a gadget freak. Something new that quickly and easily performs any kind of a function heretofore requiring a specific talent or consuming enormous amounts of time has my immediate attention. It may not even be a function I would normally perform. I convince myself that if I had the gadget that made it easy to perform that function maybe I would.

That's the reason my cabinets spill over with every dust covered, never used, or used once Ronco product ever advertised.

While my obsession may have led me to buy the "Pocket Fisherman" when I don't even like to fish, it's harmless enough. I still manage to pay my bills on time or at least after one reminder notice. If I were borrowing $2 billion a day however, I would definitely seek help from a gadget-aholic group or sign myself into a gadget recovery program.

Our government is a gadget-aholic.

Our military budget is in excess of $400 billion a year. The Pentagon has never met a weapon it doesn't like. They are not content with just buying weapons that are invented. Their military budget has a research and development expenditure to think up and produce as yet un-invented weapons. Then we buy those too.

We have so many airplanes that the U.S. Air Force can't even contain them all so we also have a Naval Air Force and an Army Air Force.

We have more of every attack weapon than any other nation in the world but the military defense budget continues to grow because we want more. If it can be bigger, or smaller, or deadlier, or newer, we want it. No, we have to have it...at any cost. It's more important than anything else. We'll cut every other program to get the money to have more weapons. If we can destroy the planet ten times over we want to be able to destroy it twenty times over. We can't seem to stop. We are hopelessly addicted to military gadgets and the advances in technology don't bode well for a recovery in the near future without an intervention.

We are in a war against terror is the excuse given for our addiction. Every addict has an excuse. We're borrowing billions to strengthen our military because we're in a war against terror. We keep increasing our national debt to buy weapons because we're in a war against terror. We are cutting programs that benefit the American people to buy weapons because we're in a war against terror.

One insidious side effect of the government addiction is that is has affected the people even though they aren't the "users". The people echo the Pentagon's excuse that we're in a war against terror so we all have to sacrifice. We quit funding things like education, Medicare, environmental protections, border patrols and the like to have more money to spend for a strong military and more weapons.

After all, how else do we expect to protect ourselves against a handful of terrorists armed with a couple of box cutters?

04-21-05