What keeps me up at night when I am thinking about the F-35 isn't the cold and cynical logistics of a shitty government program run amok or even the self-serving fraud of the politicians involved. It is the overwhelming and vehement, unquestioning support for the F-35 and for militarism as whole that this debate as revealed.
I wonder if we've gone so far over the edge into nationalistic exceptionalism and fear based moral relativism that we literally, in the psychological sense, can't hear arguments to the contrary anymore.
I wonder if we've internalized the belief that in order to be "safe" we must aggressively police the entire world and subject ourselves to constant surveillance, allow ourselves to be physically invaded in order to fly on a plane, abandon the rule of law in regard to those suspected of wrong doing and, most relevantly, declare any request the warrior class makes meritorious just because it is the warrior class asking.
Once you convince a people that they are under constant threat and that you have the only means of keeping them safe, once they've embraced this persecution complex and the paranoid, perpetual victim mindset as part of their national and personal identity, isn't it game over? 12 years later, are we already there?
I hate that my children might grow up thinking it's ok for a stranger to feel them up or look at their naked little bodies in order to go see their Grandparents on an airplane, that being suspected of wrong doing is reason enough to lock you away or kill you or that a constant state of war is normal or even somehow perversely admirable or desirable. I hate it so much I sometimes don't know what to do with the hate.
And it keeps me up at night.
"...it’s impossible to evade the fact that Endless War will inevitably degrade the citizenry of the country that engages in it. A country which venerates its military above all other institutions, which demands that its soldiers be spoken of only with religious-like worship, and which continuously indoctrinates its population to believe that endless violence against numerous countries is necessary and just — all by instilling intense fear of the minorities who are the target of that endless violence — will be a country filled with citizens convinced of the virtues and nobility of aggression." -Unintended causation
