Page 8 RAIN Summer 1986 national livelihood is everywhere pinched into wires, pipelines, and roads. A fact that cannot have eluded our military experts is that this "strongest nation in the world" is almost pitifully vulnerable on its own ground. A relatively few well-directed rifle shots, a relatively few well-placed sticks of dynamite could bring us to darkness, confusion, and hunger. And this civil weakness serves and aggravates the military obsession with megatonnage. It is only iogical that a nation weak at home should threaten abroad with whatever destruction its technology can contrive. It is logical, but it is mad. I have been arguing from what seems to me a reasonable military assumption: that a sound policy of national defense would have its essential foundation and its indispensible motives in widespread, settled, thriving local communities, each having a proper degree of independence, living so far as possible from local sources, and using its local sources with a stewardly care that would sustain its life indefinitely, even through times of adversity. But now I would like to go further, and say that such communities are not merely the prerequisites or supports of a sound national defense; they are a sound national defense. And it is not as though the two kinds of national defense are compatible; it is not as though settled, stewardly communities can thrive and at the same time support a nuclear arsenal. In fact, the present version of national defense is destroying its own supports in the land and in human The foreign threat inevitably seems diminished when our.water is unsafe to drink, when our rivers carry tonnages oftopsoil that make light of the freight they carry in boats, when our forests are dying from air pollution and acid rain, when we are sickfrom poisons in the air. commumties. It is doing this in the apathy, cynicism, and despair that it fosters, especially in the young, but it is directly destructive of land and people by the inflation and usury that it encourages. The present version of national defense, like the present version of agriculture, rests upon debt-a debt that is driving up the cost of i~terest and driving down the worth of money, putting the national government actively in competition against good young people who are striving to own their own small farms and small businesses. In spite of all our propagandists can do, the foreign threat inevitably seems diminished when our drinking water is unsafe to drink, when our rivers carry tonnages of topsoil that make light 0f the freight they carry in boats, when our forests are dying from air pollution and acid rain, when we are sick from poisons in the air. Who are the ·enemies of this country? That is a question dangerous to instituted government when people begin to ask it for themselves. Many who have seen forests clear-cut on steep slopes, who have observed the work of the strip miners, who have watched as corporations advance their claims on private property "in the public interest," are asking that question alfeady. Many more are going to ask. But we must ask, at last, if international fighting as we have known it has not become obsolete in the presence of
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