Play On!

We spend a great amount of money in order to keep ourselves — and a great many other nations — safe. We invest enormous amounts in researching military weapons, aircraft, drones, explosives, tanks, ships, etc., for military purposes. We provide the most advanced training possible for thousands of intelligent, highly screened Americans and “guest” personnel to operate our sophisticated military equipment, which often involves the latest electronic concepts.

In so doing we serve the security needs of many other nations who are our allies. That is, as long as we are protecting them.

We lessen, even eliminate, the need for these nations to spend their own money on their own security, and we tax the average American mightily in order to do so.

Without America’s providing the materiel and know-how, what would the state of readiness of most western European nations be?

An important item often overlooked, or at least under-emphasized, is that all the nations who are dependent on us for their military security are themselves freed from the enormous costs of defending themselves, and look to Big Brother USA to keep them free from attack. The U.S. has been the protector of the free world for so long that everyone on both sides takes this condition for granted.

The inherent dangers in such an assumptive attitude are as obvious as the weakness of a neighborhood boy who never develops his own fighting ability against bullies because he has a big strong brother — for the time being, at least — to do it for him.

One who has lived abroad extensively is astonished at the little pressure the U.S. uses to influence its recipient brothers politically.

Our gifts are usually without strings.

After World War II, I questioned for a while whether our forgiving help to the enemies who had attacked us treacherously and declared war against us was a sign of stupidity or benign “golden rule” morality.

I imagine that a great many of us in uniform who had been the targets of the Germans and Japanese found it uncomfortable, at the very least, to lay down our guns and accept our former would-be assassins as harmless.

The shifting from peacetime to wartime, and wartime to peacetime in an instant, is a confusing anomaly. The instant peace was declared, we took our fingers off the trigger of the weapons we had used to kill those we had long been told were our enemies.

One peculiarity in cosmopolitan America is our making light of taking credit for saving almost every other country in the free world. We did it in the first World War, and the second, and it is only the terrible might of the U.S. that preserves most of the peace we and the others now enjoy. We stopped Hitler when it was necessary for him to be stopped; who else could have done it? Ditto regarding the Japan of the 1940s.

New “bad guys” keep sticking their heads up out of the slime, and they retreat only when they see the letters “USA” on men and materiel.

What would the world be if the U.S. were a ferociously aggressive dictatorship instead of the most benign great nation in the history of this Earth?

Will we remain everybody’s big brother unless some war-like “friends” get too big for their britches?

Peace, it’s wonderful!

About Roney:

Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF

2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award

(Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)