Henry Wallace was a true hero of progressives. I am reading a biography of J. K. Galbraith and I was struck by the passages around the time when Roosevelt picked Truman to be VP in 1944, and the beginnings of the cold war in 1946-1948, when Wallace was on the other side. We went down the wrong road!

In 1949, US military spending rose by nearly 40 percent over the previous year, to five times what it had been in 1940. In 1950, it surged upward again even before the Korean War broke out... Over the next two decades, until the end of the Vietnam War era, U.S. expenditures on weapons and warriors accounted for well over half of the entire federal budget, and for several years approached two thirds of all Washington's spending. In lockstep, the federal budget's share of the total economy grew dramatically and reached more than twice the size of Franklin Roosevelt's largest New Deal peacetime budget. Put another way, between the end of World War II and the year Dwight Eisenhower left office fifteen years later, the United States spent more annually on its Army, Navy, and Air Force (not counting the Korean War years, and adjusting for inflation) than it had in World War II itself. That transformation inevitably profoundly reshaped the entire country.

In 1998, the Brookings Institution published the most comprehensive independent estimate to date on the total cost of modern U.S. military spending... Money spent on nuclear weapons alone, the study noted, far exceeded the combined total spent on education; law enforcement; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; job training, employment, and social services; community and regional development; and energy production and regulation since World War II.

-- Richard Parker, in John Kenneth Galbraith, His Life, His Politics, His Economics

If you want to know why we are where we are today, one need only look at those fateful years.

I have become so tired (from ten consecutive work weeks of 89 hours plus) that most of the comments I have made in the past month -- maybe longer than that -- have been nothing more than embarrassing non sequiturs that disrupt threads with their inappropriate inanity.
Nonetheless, I am deeply moved by the themes of this thread, as I am inspired by Lux, who wrote it, and impressed by the insights of those who have responded to it so far.
It is a sadness too vast to compute to finally accept that our beloved country has been spiraling out of control -- in support of military spending at the cost of everything else -- since the year I was born. Terrifying to realize that the "grown-ups" who were in charge when I was a child were not grown up at all -- which on some level I and all my peers, knew: who but the childishly posturing, or frightenally inept, could conceive and implement nuclear war drills in schools, in which our "defense" was to sit on the floor, either under our desks or in the hallway, with our arms braced "protectively" over our heads? An entire generation of children and young adolescents was traumatized by this repeated exercise, even as we recognized, immediately, that it was insane.
But at least we actually remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the incredible whispered conversations among parents: to quickly build, or not to build, a backyard bomb shelter? To flee, or not to flee, from the East coast to the Heartland?
And at least we remember the decisions our own generation had to make, not that many years later: to serve, or to refuse to serve, in Vietnam? To protest, or not to protest, the War until it ended? To stay and work collaboratively for change, or to flee, to Canada or to Europe?
For all the mistakes the Baby Boom generation has made, for all the sell-outs and buy-ins to corporate greed, at least when we began we had context, and that context, during Vietnam, had moral fiber; we were engaged in ethical debate based on our clear understanding of what constitutes moral right and wrong, and our ferocity was based in our belief that it was important to stand up for the common good, every bit as much as it was also based in honestly acknowledging fear.
I don't know what happened to our generation, after Vietnam. The same young men we protested with against the war, the same young men we watched burning their draft cards at great personal risk, were the same young men who, just a few years later, got expensive graduate degrees in order to don expensive suits to march to an entirely different drummer in an entirely different cause -- that of personal aggrandizement and enrichment, without recourse to remembered principle, which was abandoned without a backward glance.
Much sadder, then, by far, is the experience of those of you who were born well after those pivotal episodes. The experience of those of you who have no memory of ethical discussions, other than those that have been used to mock ethics as an ivory tower pursuit for those not in the "trenches" of Wall Street. Those of you who grew up on a steady diet of make more and spend more to somehow be more, who learned to look at the bond traders and short sellers of both the Baby Boom and GenX as heros, along with their brethren sitting in obscenely luxurious corporate offices.
What context were you of GenY, or of the Millenium offered, ever?
So, yes, please talk about ethics, even if you perceive it as hieroglyphics that must be dusted off and decoded for meaning.
Your world, the world of your children, and of all creatures, great and small, depends on what you discussions you have, and what decisions you make, and what actions you take, from now on.

This was a happy exercise in commemoration WW, and once again the comments ennobled the thread! Your writing today feels like true gold gleaned from the fire and maybe "in weariness, truth" I find your (and TheraP's) comments to be almost like hearing myself..."birds of a feather".

The last two sentences in my reply above were not aimed at you, but the rhetorical "you". It seems to me that historical illiteracy ill-serves us in ways obvious and not-so-obvious.

Thanks WW. And thanks to your grandfather too.