The Pentagon issued its annual report recently on suicide in the military, and it provides us with very sad news. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on programs to stem this crisis, the suicide rate for active-duty U.S. troops rose to 28.7 per 100,000 during 2020, up from 26.3 per 100,000 the previous year. […]
It’s easy to conclude that it’s not. In 1915, as national governments produced the shocking carnage of World War I, Ralph Chaplin, an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World, wrote his stirring song, “Solidarity Forever.” Taken up by unions around the globe, it proclaimed that there was “no power greater anywhere beneath the sun” than international working class solidarity. But, today, despite Chaplin’s dream of bringing to birth “a new world from the ashes of the old,” the world remains sharply divided by national boundaries—boundaries that are usually quite rigid, policed by armed guards, and ultimately enforced through that traditional national standby, war. […]
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