A simple Google search of “the world’s largest employer,” instantly frames the disease that continues to grow unabated. There is nothing we can do now. The sheer size and scale of the problem is mind-boggling and sadly, there seems to be no way to defund or shrink the problem.

Once you have millions of Americans working in defense, weapons, surveillance and militarism as well as their livelihoods (salary, housing, insurance) tied to the same system, there is no way to course correct towards something far more productive for not only America, but the world.

If you sit atop of this apparatus, like so many at the Council on Foreign Relations and other private defense think tanks as well as the state department, you can wield this machine indiscriminately, and go after even the smallest of a dissenters, e.g. pro-peace festivals, etc., or even poorer counties, e.g. Yemen, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Libya. et al.

When we think deeply of the ramifications of the story, The Last Fish, the drivers and core actuators of this future world were principally related to war, militarism and never ending ‘us vs them’ mentalities.

Praying and protesting are not enough as the war machine knows when it is an idea in your head as you begin to reach out to others over social media. Even your posts are tracked using AI via nsa, cyber command (under the naval warfare center), and another host of 35 agencies and departments to ascertain whether or not you are critical of the same system. These machines and humans sift through everyday American’s messages and emails relentlessly turning over every critical stone.

It is even worse that the dystopian worlds created by the authors, Huxley and Orwell, because of the sheer power of machine learning and neural nets, which they could not have envisioned.

An last, illuminating google search of ‘world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels, yields The United States Military. Using the wayback machine it is easy to see they have tried continually to amend this, (shielding from the public) so many times to skirt around it and blame China and others, but as a institution no one on Earth creates the kind of pollution and carbon as the military.

Finally, because nearly $1.2T is spent on this giant machine / apparatus every 12 months (that’s $400,000,000,000 every 90 days) there are too many human brains working on something so grotesque as surveillance, weapons, warships, warplanes, bases, etc. etc that this is all sunk human intelligence that could have been routed elsewhere. It’s as if you are running a car manufacturing business and you put all your operating expenditures into factory floor soap, it makes no sense to the rational mind.

Underneath all this is a system that is actually collapsing the US from the inside, an “us vs. them” mentality led by the least among us in society.  If human history has taught us anything it is that this type of mental construct does not hold up over time. All non-collaborative empires adopting this framework have collapsed, full stop.

What this means is that the millions working in this day to day are not long harming themselves and others but also collapsing the very country they live.

We are powerless against this machine and the only hope is that those inside see it for what it is and begin to steer it off a cliff into a burning dumpster where it has belonged ever since world war two, the war to end all wars.

It is sad that a children’s book author has to write this, but it underscores the seriousness of the problem facing the present time.

—August Ritchie