Pope Leo in several speeches has asked to world to abolish war but has given no specifics. What every parent learns fast that to get results, your orders must be concise and clear.
Please make this recommendation to Pope Leo.
Pope Leo’s final product will probably include:
1) Starting a Second Marshall Plan that will end poverty everywhere and reverse global warming,
2) Taxing arms sales,
3) Beginning a moratorium on nuclear weapons research,
4) Reducing the bloated US military budget by 50%,
(The US defense budget is equal to the next 9 countries in line.)
5) Training our armed forces for disaster relief,
6) Establishing a cabinet level War Abolition Department,
7) Reducing American and Russian nuclear weapons to 1,000 each, and,
8) Reducing American overseas military bases from 750 to 100,
9) Negotiating for all the world’s nuclear weapons to go off hair trigger alert,
10) Reforming Income Tax Code where only major corporations and families with more than $250,000 annual income would pay federal income tax, and,
11) Abolish the War on Drugs which has been ineffective and corrupt. Look at the drug laws in Portugal, the Netherlands and Uruguay.
12) Establish a world-wide FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Program) for famines, fires, wars, droughts, floods recovery for every country.
13) Regulate artificial intelligence.
14) Fund alternative energy.
It is not just Quakers and hippies who have told us that humans have to end war, see this excerpt from General Douglas MacArthur’s address to the US Congress on April 19, 1951:
Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.
Background: I am a retired certified public accountant from Houston, Texas, USA, living in Medellin, Colombia since 2008. In January, 1969, I realized that it was not just the Vietnam War was wrong. They are all wrong.
Thank you for your attention.
We shall overcome,
Ed O’Rourke
Medellin, Colombia