The price of freedom.

 

This is a picture of me in 2018 taken on board the USS Missouri in Hawaii.  It was an emotional moment for me as it really brought the reality of the second world war home.  The ship served in the Pacific campaign in the last year of the war and was the place where Japan formally surrendered. It also served in the Korean war and the Gulf war.  She was decommissioned during the time between those two conflicts.  The great ship was finally decommissioned in 1992 and has been on display as a floating museum at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii.

It is estimated that the Missouri alone had a construction cost of approximately 1.8 billion dollars back in the 1940s.  In today's dollars that figure balloons to nearly 8 billion dollars.  That's just for the beast itself and not the weaponry, the 2500 servicemen that crewed her, and the cost of fuel to fire its enormous boilers.  Add to that the approximately 1,200 naval vessels made of destroyers, cruisers, battleships, submarines, aircraft carriers, and escorts.  Now, that's just for the navy and just for WWII.

Of course, this relates to the financial cost of war.  How many people died in service of their country overall?  What about the cost to people's lives in injuries, trauma, and ability to contribute to the economy upon return?  If you take everything into account the price goes into the trillions, not that you could really put a number on it.

My point here is that freedom is not free.  Not only is it expensive financially, but it is also expensive in the cost of human lives and suffering.  You would think that humanity would, by now, understand that concept and exercise common sense when it comes to international relations.  Yet we find a build-up of arms and people in Russia and the West countering with an escalation of their own.  And all for what?  Human pride, arrogance, and the possibility of being remembered in history books.  Surely we should be beyond such frivolous behaviour and waste of resources. 

Imagine if these costs were put into climate change, environmental cleanup, and looking after the homeless and hungry.  What a different world we would live in.

Freedom is not free but expensive in so many different ways.  It turns out that the cost is even steeper than you may think because those revenues and efforts are dispensed towards outcomes that protect our freedom instead of enhancing it.  I can see why people wish for world peace.  How much better off would we all be if it existed and we sought for the best world we could manage?  I think the difference would be staggering.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com