the kernans dot com

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So I wasn’t expecting anything here to turn political (I was doing that deliberately) but I got upset tonight watching TV and saw an ad provided by our military. Full disclosure – I half paid attention because we live our life through a DVR so real-time TV just happens occasionally so I only caught part of it. However the gist of the ad was about how other nations could be plotting to blow up our satellites which could affect the internet/electronic transactions, etc thus take away our freedom, yada yada yada. The whole ad was cheesy and totally irrelevant from the issues that people in the U.S. are really facing now. It just felt like it was one more thing we had to be afraid of.  I couldn’t find the ad on the web doing a quick search so if I find it I will post it here.  I hate to perpetuate the message but it helps to see it so you understand where I am coming from.

Luckily we have the air force/army/etc protecting us against that and you should join up to get a job protecting us from evil missiles blowing up our ability to spend the tax rebate check (ok that was a little embellishment but you get the point). I guess the ad worked because it got my attention, focused me on talking about it but it really made me mad. Don’t we have more important things to worry about (food, shelter, clean water, the environment, over using the precious resources we have available to us, working together with other nations to make this a more peaceful/useful world, wow this list could get long if you really thought about it, etc) than someone blowing up our satellites? It just feels like misdirection away from the things that matter to continue to prey on our fears like this.

I really don’t want to think about how many better ways we could spend our money than to hire marketing people, create the message, and buy the airtime for this stuff. This is just another example of why we should reduce the military budget and try to fix things at home before we start perpetuating a message of distrust against the rest of the world. Last time I checked we were all part of the same race (=human). I guess it must be easier to spend a bunch of money, build elaborate defense systems, and create a huge infrastructure to fight/undermine them than it would be to have an open dialog of mutually assured friendship.

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Filed under: pk, political on April 11th, 2008