The actual origin of the statement came from a book length poem written by my favorite poet, Carl Sandburg called “The People, Yes” (1936)
The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,
“What are those?”
“Soldiers.”
“What are soldiers?”
“They are for war.
They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can.”
The girl held still and studied.
“Do you know … I know something?”
“Yes, what is it you know?”
“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
We all know this from the 60’s, when we were tired of being horrified at all the death and killing going on in Viet Nam. We had sit-ins, and love-ins and protests and rallies and posters. We had riots and the Chicago democratic convention :
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked riots across the country. This trend of unrest and violence continued in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at which antiwar protesters fought with police. Overall, this created a climate of high racial and political tension and activism as Project 500 began in September of 1968.
From <http://project500.omeka.net/exhibits/show/bpi/universityhistory/riots-and-tension-in-1968>
All culminating in the Kent State shootings of 1970 caused by the US’s decision to get involved with Cambodia and widen the Viet Nam war:
The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre)[2][3][4] occurred at Kent State University in the US city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.[
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings>
The event caused an uproar and student strike that led to hundreds of colleges and universities to close. Some suggest that this event is what causes the slide into Watergate and that whole debacle.
1967
Suppose They Give a War and No One Comes Lyrics
The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
This is an African tribal chant that we wrote called
‘Suppose they give a war and no one comes’
I hate war, I have seen war, I have seen war on the land and the sea
I have seen blood running in the street, I have seen small children, starving
I have seen the agony of fellows and wives, I HATE WAR
Hear the marching, hear the drums, suppose they give a war and no one comes
Hear the marching, hear the drums, suppose they give a war and no one comes
Hear the marching, hear the drums, suppose they give a war and no one comes
It was our fervent dream back in those days that the Power of the People could rise up and create a Peace and Love Movement so strong that it would take hold of the world and change it. And when the War Mongers realized that it just might work, they infiltrated it from the bottom up and began its ultimate destruction.
They even went so far as to murder people who had a voice, beloved people; “All we are saying, is give peace a chance”…
While all this was going on, so were experiments like MKUltra and mind warping and modifying alien tech. From what I can tell there hasn’t been a time since before WWII (and probably long before) that somebody hasn’t been trying to figure out how to control human kind. Even the word government has nasty implications when you take it apart:
govern; rule, preside over, reign over, control, be in charge of, command, lead, dominate;
ment; mental mind….
And as our government was also slowly and silently usurped from the bottom up by the corporate moguls we were being encouraged to become ever more into self, (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain) to discover who we were, and what our primal emotional moments were so we could better know ourselves. All the while big money was growing into a monster called:
cor·po·ra·toc·ra·cy (kôrpərəˈtäkrəsē/) noun noun: corporatocracy;
plural noun: corporatocracies
a society or system that is governed or controlled by corporations. “in this age of corporatocracies, the money goes not to the inventor, but to the company”
From <https://www.google.com/>
We didn’t notice because we were too busy recovering from the after effects of the big love in; drugs and AIDs.
A 2003 analysis of HIV types found in the United States, compared to known mutation rates, suggests that the virus may have first arrived in the United States in this year.[6] The disease spread from the 1966 American strand, but remained unrecognized for another 12 years.[7] This is, however, contradicted by the estimated area of time of initial infection of Robert Rayford who was most likely infected around 1959.
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_HIV/AIDS>
Many of us were scrambling to get our lives together and have children and grow the American dream, trying to buy houses while the financial market crashed around our ears, all the while not realizing that it was getting harder and harder to do just that, and have all that we were still ‘fighting’ so hard for overseas.
The 1973–1974 bear market was a bear market that lasted between January 1973 and December 1974. Affecting all the major stock markets in the world, particularly the United Kingdom,[1] it was one of the worst stock market downturns in modern history.[2] The crash came after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system over the previous two years, with the associated ‘Nixon Shock‘ and United States dollar devaluation under the Smithsonian Agreement. It was compounded by the outbreak of the 1973 oil crisis in October of that year. It was a major event of the 1970s recession.
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%9374_stock_market_crash>
So many of us put off our dreams, knuckled down and worked harder. For some of us, like me, that meant not even considering going to college. As we all ‘tried harder’ got tired-er and found deeper and more radical ways of taking our minds off how miserable it was to not be succeeding but not yet realizing it was nothing we were doing. We looked for that diamond in the rough, that one entrepreneur-ish idea that could set us financially free. Not realizing that we were still at war. (we were getting good at ‘not realizing’). After WWII there have been 248 armed conflicts of which the US started 201 of them. There is a Wikipedia page that lists ALL of the armed conflicts we have been in since the founding of the country. It’s scary amazing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations is a timeline of United States government military operations. The list through 1975 is based on Committee on International Relations (now known as the Committee on Foreign Affairs). Dates show the years in which U.S. government military units participated. Items in bold are the U.S. government wars most often considered to be major conflicts by historians and the general public. Note that instances where the U.S. government gave aid alone, with no military personnel involvement, are excluded, as are Central Intelligence Agency operations
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations>
They knew the way to bolster a flagging economy was simple, create more wars. Those wars could supply more business to the corporatocracy created after WWII to keep all that money flowing in and all the CEO’s happy with their profit margins
Based on the SIPRI report, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 biggest weapons companies. Arms were defined as sales to military customers, either for procurement or for export, but do not include sales of general purpose items, such as oil or computer equipment. We looked at sales figures for two years through 2011, among other metrics. Here are the 10 companies that profit the most from war:
U.S. government military units have participated in 19+ armed conflicts since 2010. And when the Conflict Du Jour gets stale in the media, they dream up another one to titillate you with because they are ALL connected, the government and the corporations and the media. The media that used to be for us has been conscripted and taken over by the corporatocracy. What used to be many, is now run by so few.
In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. … [I]n 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine. … [I]n 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty three. … [I]n 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever. … [In 2000] AOL Time Warner’s $350 billion merged corporation [was] more than 1,000 times larger [than the biggest deal of 1983].
–Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), pp. xx—xxi
Now there are about 6 media giants who own everything mainstream, says Wikipedia, with a nice chart to delineate it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States. There are even allegations about NPR! In a scathing article on 12Bytes.org said:
A few hours of research on your part will shed some light on why, for instance, a particular mainstream media company with defense contractors sitting on its board has little incentive to inform the public about devastating human and environmental consequences that depleted uranium weaponry has caused, and continues to cause, in the middle east , as well as other locations around the world that the U.S. and its allies choose to inflict “democracy” upon.
From <http://12bytes.org/articles/exposed/npr-national-public-radio-or-national-propaganda-radio>
This article goes on to look in extreme depth at the underlying political and corporate ties in NPR. Just as an example of how media/corporations/gov’t are tied into each other and in their respective back pockets. The allegations in this article are eye opening because they tie the money to the gov’t to the corporations, like Lockheed Martin…..?? Just to make sure most of us never ever look behind that damned curtain to see who’s really up to what, they have given us a new drug:
fear
[feer] Spell Syllables
noun
1. a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.
Synonyms: foreboding, apprehension, consternation, dismay, dread, terror, fright, panic, horror, trepidation, qualm.
Antonyms: courage, security, calm, intrepidity.
porn
[pawrn] Informal.
noun
[pawr-noh] (Show IPA). pornography.
2.
television shows, articles, photographs, etc., thought to cater to an excessive, irresistible desire for or interest in something:
a magazine filled with enticing food porn; an addiction to real-estate porn.
From <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/porn?s=t>
And now the media (or is that uh… the government which oh, cough, is actually the corporatocracy… or is it the aliens ?) is having another field day with us, feeding the addiction they have striven to give us. ISIS Is the pattern clear enough yet? Let’s not even go into the moral or ethical question about getting involved or not. It’s quite paralyzing. After all isn’t that what they wanted? To stop even the thinkers and the fringe? It’s enough to make even the toughest person exhausted.
In the Mind's Eye 
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold.
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.
“The People, Yes” (1936) Carl Sandburg
One of the things that I did not mention in ‘Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came” is the emotional abuse as an underlying theme in this whole situation. Yes, an overarching sense of bruised, misused, crushed, torn and ragged emotional torture we have all lived with for the last 60 or so years. We are almost beyond remembering what it is to feel normal because it has been so very long since it was normal. We are all numb and hopeless. We feel powerless and weak. These are all symptoms of someone who has been held as an emotional hostage beyond their ability to endure.
We have turned to TV, movies, drinking, drugs, puppy videos, gaming, over eating, anything that can take our awareness away from the mind numbing pain of the realization that there is no way out of this mess we are in. We are hypnotized, paralyzed traumatized and brutalized on a daily basis by the news, the TV shows, our bosses, our mates, our partners our life styles. We come home and numb out just to get some relief. Now it looks like the coming trend will be to legalize marijuana, and we can use that as another tool to take away the pain. Especially after is it grown by state and federal mandate in state farms and the GMO and big Pharma get a hold it. I’ll be they even manage to engineer something in it that will change your brain chemistry to enhance its calmative dumb down effects.
We have also been mentally and intellectually abused. Our schools have gotten too expensive to afford, academia is corralled and told not to teach the facts, our best and most forward thinkers are ostracized for thinking, our scientists are murdered and our children are taught how to be perfect little robots, or they are drugged.
My point in all the doom and gloom is, consider the weight of all this in your heart and on your shoulders. It is enough. We all know it, we all feel it, yet none of us has a way out of it. Personally I am beyond tired of it. I was done way back when I was a kid with all the ‘mean’ people in the world. I have no solution. I have been through all of the self-help-new age ideas and tricks. Now I simply breathe each day, measure the steps I take, the words I speak and the loves I can love. I tumble into bed every night in utter exhaustion from the weight of the realizations I carry. And wish there was a way to help.
Carl Sandberg was right.
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