Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza in a week than the US and its partners dropped in any single month in its campaign against ISIS. Ordinance does not spring out of the Earth, fully formed, ready to ensure that children and adults will be burnt alive, shredded by debris, and/or buried under the rubble of where they once lived with their loved ones, in a sort of grotesque parody of the family home.
Without the people who make bombs, we would not have bombs. This is a statement of fact. Its simplicity or naivete make it no less true. Many of the people who contribute do so tangentially, in a global economy, in ways that are difficult to connect. But many others do so directly, not because they were conscripted or victims of predatory recruitment practices, but because they want a good career. For them, this is not a question of survival, but of a comfortable, upper-middle-income life, far-removed from consequences or danger. Many of them live in the United States, where I live, and where many of you live, too. They have job titles like my own, and like those of many of my colleagues. They are often productive, respectable members of society. Their kids go to soccer practice. They rake their leaves in the fall. If you meet them at the neighborhood cookout, they're perfectly nice and friendly, even if you feel discomfort after learning that they work in "defense," a sweet little euphemism. They are normal people.
They are also bad people. This is a judgement I feel comfortable making, as someone for whom that comfortable and lucrative career path was open, but who cannot imagine using an education for which I am deeply thankful and a skill-set so highly employable to create profitable, efficient machines of death.
It is true, as those people might say to defend themselves, that we all have to make a living somehow. I do not deny this. I merely insist on its universality. We all must make a living, for which being alive is a necessary prerequisite. Any living that denies the same to others is immoral. In our complex world built on violence and exploitation, I readily admit how difficult it can be to figure out where exactly to draw the line, but these complexities cannot be used to justify work that is so obviously beyond it. The existence of difficult moral quandaries does not excuse a complete moral abdication.
From there, apologists may argue that by designing bombs carefully, they can actually reduce innocent loss of life. Recall that bombs are dropped from the sky for the sole purpose of causing loss of life. Making these explosions slightly smaller and better aimed is not humanitarian work, to say nothing of the implication that far-away governments should have both the technology and the right to decide who is innocent and who is not. These kinds of absurd justifications exist to comfort the public. It is easier to condone bombs and those who make them if we are told that they are so technologically precise that they only kill the bad guys. This is why, when one of these supposedly-high-tech precision bombs causes an explosion that kills an aid worker delivering water, the government is quick to explain that there must have been a second, less precise bomb, the kind of bombs bad people use, that the aid worker was actually carrying it around for ISIS, and that our good bomb must have accidentally triggered it. The government lied, slandering the aid worker they had just murdered. It's a story that exposes the obvious absurdity of these claims.
Finally, defenders may resort to that most tired argument: "If I don't do it, someone else will." This is the last argument of cowards, too weak and too comfortable not just to examine their own complicity, but to imagine that another world is possible but for people like them.
People have put out many statements about this and previous wars, some wonderful and deeply moving, others sickening and disturbing. Very few offer something concrete the reader can do. This is not necessarily bad, but reflects the complex reality in which we live. Today, I offer a concrete suggestion: If you make bombs, quit. If you know someone who makes bombs, tell them to quit. If they won't quit, tell them that they suck.