Cedar
Valley Voices: An Iowan Hopes for A Chance for Peace
by Dave Bradley
The CedarValley Voices project is a citizen response to state Representative
Jeff Kaufmann’s column in the West Branch Times during the
Iowa legislative session.
This will be the last column in the Cedar Valley Voices series for this year. Thanks to all those who have spent some time with us and to all the writers who contributed. Some
thoughts for today from President Eisenhower. Recently I came across an address given by Dwight Eisenhower shortly after he became president. Many people are familiar with Eisenhower’s final address to the nation where he warned of the ‘military and industrial complex’ which at that time was just coming into its own. However, not many are familiar with the address in which Eisenhower spelled out what supporting a huge military can really cost.
Here is an excerpt from that address:
Eisenhower hated war as only one who lived through it could. And he saw the true costs of war probably more clearly than most. He saw that the true costs of war were more than destroyed property, but also destroyed futures.
We now have a president who has once again established diplomacy as the first priority in international dealings. Let us hope and pray that he continues along the path. And that someday soon instead of building bombs and the bombers that carry them, we can finally cash in the so-called peace dividend that was earned when the cold war ended during the first Bush administration.
It is time for America to turn its attention to building schools and hospitals, toward creating new and renewable sources of energy and to educating its citizenry for the competitive world to come.
Dave
Bradley
E-mail Dave here
Dave Bradley is a self-described
retired observer of American politics “trying to figure out how we got
so screwed up.” An
Iowa City native currently living in West Liberty, Dave and his wife
Carol have two grown children who “sadly had to leave the state to find
decent paying jobs.“
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