I may have missed it in history class, but did the Roman consuls ever gather up all taxes from the citizens - then load the wagons with all the coin and barley or whatever and pack it all off in one direction to, say, China to fund their wars with the Huns and in another direction to, idk, Egypt to fund a war there? They’d have strung up Pontius Pilate if he pulled some crap like that, right? Here we are in America. A citizen democracy. We have somehow become the war bank of the world. Ike Eisenhower could explain, RIP. Somehow through the alchemic permutations of democratic representation the will of the American citizen has come to raise taxes to pay for wars in and between other countries. That seems way off from any historically tenable example of democratic citizenry. To back up a step, all this started as a way for people to collectively fund commons like schools and libraries or build roads and militias to check brigands. Funding other nations’ wars seems like a bit of a stretch whatever the merits of the side we are back stopping. Its hard to see how our duty as citizens can entail any such activity however one slices it. Notice which faces they blow up and give center stage and which get inset. What is scarier to you New York America, the Hindu India theocracy or that your democratic representatives are ramming through war funding for multiple wars your country is-😉😉-not directly involved in full stop? France may have that route with colonial America and were shortly run off the world stage.
I made a note that we have entered World War III. Iran is a partisan in the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel. In the former they are a critical industrial supplier of war technology like drones. In the latter they are active supplying weapons to the proxy forces fighting Israeli forces in Lebanon and Yemen. The United States is a similar partisan actor in both conflicts. Plotted on a map with pushpin string these and other nodes create a growing spider web of global conflict.
The stoner celebration of April 20 especially annoys me because 4/20 is one of the seminal dark days of infamy of American history like 9/11 or 12/7. Today is the 25th anniversary of Columbine watershed event that normalized random acts of American civil war.
Keep it real, y’all. God bless taxes.