THE FUTURE – THE WAR GIANT
The trillion dollars mentioned in the song is not just a metaphor, it is the actual amount spent on weapons per year : a million million ($1,000,000,000,000). The number is so big it is difficult to grasp or comprehend. So big it’s surreal. So big it’s almost ridiculous. When this is in fact very real and extremely serious. Can you imagine what we could build with so much money? The War Giant would say it doesn’t work like that. Weapons create jobs. Weapons are then sold and create profit. You can even sell weapons to your enemies and then have your soldiers killed by your very weapons (this has happened before). Yes, but we’re talking spendings: a million million that our countries could put in social plans, in schools, in libraries, in books… in construction rather than destruction. CREATING VS DESTROYING. And how do you accomplish this miracle? Well, that’s easy enough. You don’t pick the gun. You don’t pull the trigger. You refuse to manufacture firearms. You refuse to even touch the thing. Because that’s the interesting thing with weapons, they don’t operate without humans. The War Giant can create as many weapons as he wants, if everyone refused to use them, to touch them, it would be the very end of it. And dictators and generals can only kill so much people disobeying until there is no one willing to even touch a weapon. No armies. No weapons. Total refusal. Until we even forget how to build them. Banish all firearms. Banish all armies.
Gil Scott-Heron said it before, peace doesn’t come easy, we’ve got to work for it:
“The military and the monetary
Get together whenever they think it's necessary
They have turned our brothers and sisters into mercenaries,
They are turning the planet into a cemetery. (…)
Peace ain’t gonna be easy.
Peace ain’t gonna be free.
We’ve got to work for peace.”
(Gil Scott-Heron, “Work For Peace,” 1994)