To the editor,

President Trump’s military parade scheduled for Saturday, June 14 should give us pause to consider the message this event is broadcasting to our country and to the world.

Historically, military parades are held to celebrate victory in a war. By contrast, the parade on the 14th seems to commemorate only Trump’s birthday. It’s estimated that taxpayers will foot the bill to the tune of $45 million.

As a measure of how the money for Trump’s vanity parade could be more constructively spent, the Center for American Progress estimates that $45 million could allow 20,000 veterans and their families to retain access to food aid currently threatened by cuts in the GOP’s “big beautiful” budget bill.

The American public has too long been impoverished by the military-industrial complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address in 1961. Since World War II the US has remained in perpetual wartime economic production, fattening the pockets of some very rich arms manufacturers. The current proposed budget allots an obscene $850 billion to the military for 2025.

With the US withdrawing much of its humanitarian aid around the world, we are sacrificing our “soft power” influence for a domineering military posture founded on weapons and international bullying rather than responsible global citizenship.

Supplying 43% of the world’s armaments to over 100 nations, the US contributes untold death and suffering to humankind and the earth, in what militarism critic Norman Solomon calls, in the title of his latest book, “war made invisible.”

Unfortunately, both major political parties have contributed to the growth of the arms industry, though Trump has been the first president to flaunt it quite so nakedly with his wannabe-dictator birthday parade.  

We all, Democrats and Republicans alike, need to ask ourselves if we really want to keep enabling our bloated arms industry’s domestic and world-wide commerce of death, misery, and destruction. 

Thomas R. Smith

River Falls