All Air Show All The Time

More Reasons To Hate The Air Show

As if a million didn't come to mind every time the planes buzz your house and rattle your windows - or wake your sleeping child, as they have been doing with my baby daughter all day. Here's a few more:

1) These "neato" airplanes cause death and deformity. The little girl in the photo is one of many suffering from deformities in Fallujah, Iraq, as a result of the US assault on that city, which included airplanes (whee, aren't they pretty?!) dropping chemical weapons everywhere.

2) Each of the new F-35 Lightnings - the new fighter jet - costs $80 million dollars and the Pentagon is buying 2,500 of them. That's $200 billion. It costs $400 to provide food, clothes, education and medicine to ten children in Mexico for a month. In other words, they could provide these things for a full year for 42 million Mexican children (Mexico has a total population of 109 million). In Africa, a child can be fed for 10¢/day. In other words, global poverty could be eliminated.

3) Climate change. The US Military is a massive greenhouse gas hog, burning 462 million gallons of fuel in 2005. The US military is amongst the world's largest contributor to global climate change. Think about the effects if the US invested that $200 billion into renewable energy!