Skip to content

No to more arms spending.

Fighter planes not a good investment of public money.

Dear editor,

Needed: an educated and informed citizenry.

If anyone stopped and asked me what I think were the two most significant aspects of my life as it affected the larger development of life on earth — from a human perspective — I would say: oil and the arms industry.

Oil has given my generation incredible power and the possibility for technological advancement beyond anything 19th-century people could have dreamed. Take the mighty industrial might of the USA. Not only have they and are they using their own oil resources (although their own only sparingly for a rainy day) but also the oil resources from wherever they can get them. Now there is a second big player: China!

The second development during these last 80-plus years was and is the arms industry, and without oil this would not have been possible.

In 1944 (I was fourteen then) when scientists succeeded in exploding the Bomb, Stinson, the secretary of defence at the time, urged the president and cabinet and Pentagon heavies that the atom secret must be shared with the Russians (the Soviets) or the arms race will be on. He was overruled and the rest is history. (A professor, Dr. Rotblatt, resigned in protest and 65 scientists signed a petition that the weapon not be used – read, House of War.)

If you added up what was spent in so-called peacetime since WWII on the weapons industry, you know why the USA today owes $16,000,000,000,000!

Are we complacent enough to allow our 39.6% voted-in Conservative government to go ahead with the incredible folly and spend $25,000,000,000 on fighter planes that are the arm’s technology of yesterday? New wars are fought with new weapons: information, intelligence, justice/fairness and the UN decreeing over disputes at the conference table and not by shooting at each other.

Isaiah 2:4; please open the Bible and double-check.

Do I hear you say the arms industry created employment?

Eighty-five thousand houses are needed to be built on Native Reserves from coast to coast to coast. And when I see these mobile homes in Canada I can’t believe what I see – in the wood-resource, richest country  — that not every Canadian family should own a modest little house with a fine garden surrounding it for growing vegetables and enjoying a lovingly cultivated flower section. (Look at the fine work our master gardener is doing downtown at the junction of Granville and Rupert!)