Browsing: I realize that this is who we are

    This is Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in 1940, just as World War II has opened its jaws. In that context, yes, his words make sense, but the paradox hiding in those words – the speech titled “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” – is that with victory there may be no survival either. The Good War gave us, of course, the nuclear bomb. It gave us much of the military hell that’s happened in my lifetime. It also gave us, along with a multi-trillion-dollar annual global military budget, a sense of eternal necessity to be ready for the next evil monster who wants to get us.