by James Glaser
January 2, 2004

The first unit in the Rose Parade this year was the United States Marine Corps Mounted Color Guard, followed by the Marine Corps Band. Some people stood, removed their hats, put their right hand over their heart and kept quiet as the flag passed. Those people were showing the proper respect for our national symbol.

When the Band went by playing the Marine Corp Hymn everyone cheered as I think they should. The people that volunteer to guard our nation should be cheered by all of us.

The next unit was a B-1 bomber flanked by two F-18 jet fighters. This was starting to look like a Communist May Day celebration. I started looking for huge missiles coming down the street. The Rose Parade is all about flowers and football. Yes we are at war and we should honor the troops, but this parade is turning into a nationalistic propaganda event.

The Americans along the parade route were cheering as those planes flew low over the crowd. These people, if they stopped to think about it were cheering for huge killing machines. Every year America invests many billions of dollars into the development of new machines, whose only function is to kill.

Some people will tell you that these planes save lives, but when a plane is named a “bomber,” its only job is to drop explosive material on another country. We have learned over the last fifty years that with bombing, more innocent people are killed than we would like to admit.

We can argue the merits of one aircraft over another, but what I am getting at here is that our country is becoming more and more like a total military culture. We have been in an almost constant state of military conflict since 1941. We have had over 70 conflicts since then with Vietnam lasting over a decade and we might as well admit that we have been attacking Iraq since the first Gulf War. Iraq became our training ground for bomber pilots with the no-fly zones. So, chalk up another decade of conflict for Iraq.

I would liked to have seen some Peace floats, but “peace is out of fashion in America today. In today’s America we are scared. Scared of terrorists, Weapons of Mass Destruction, dirty bombs, enemy combatants and anything else Washington can come up with to terrorize us.

One attack and our nation falls apart. We have killed tens of thousands of people as a response to the September 11th attack. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars making many new millionaires out of those that sell us weapon systems and we have done almost nothing to make this world a safer or a friendlier place in which to live.

Sure people will point to George Bush’s donation of 15 billion tax dollars to fight AIDS around the world. The problem with that is that we cut it down to 2 billion and have put so many restrictions on getting the money, many countries will get nothing. If we spent dollar for dollar on peaceful projects that we spend on weapons that are built to kill, we would be better off.

Someday I hope and pray that America will have parades with Peace Corps workers marching by. A parade with a float made of white roses depicting an American hospital ship. A float made in the shape of a water well that we will have given to countries all around this globe.

I don’t want America to be known as the greatest military power in the history of the world, I want America to be known as the greatest country in the history of the world and I could go for a parade that reflects that.