A COLLAGE OF WAR: Eisenhower’s Warning for a Wartime America

Preface (Colleen Akiko):

With the United States at war again, public conversation tends to split into two exhausted lanes: headline reactions and helplessness. Dan Strawn offers a third lane: memory, context, and moral clarity.

Dan is an 87-year-old American citizen who offers an elder's long view. He voted for the first time in 1959. He writes not as a pundit, but someone who has watched our country repeat the same moves for decades—and who still believes citizens have a responsibility to look straight at what war costs.

In his first guest post of his series, A COLLAGE OF WAR, Dan turns to President Dwight D. Eisenhower—war hero, president, and unlikely critic of war’s real price tag. You might notice how Eisenhower’s words don’t soften what's true -- they sharpen it. He emphasizes that war drains the human future, and examines the moral threshold for starting it.

Read Dan’s reflection as an invitation to slow down, ignore drive-by opinions, and sit with a hard question: what are we sacrificing—without noticing—when war becomes part of the routine?

Author Dan Strawn looks at Eisenhower’s anti-war warnings—and what they mean when leaders launch strikes mid-negotiation.

THE POST:

I couldn't vote until I was twenty-one. That was the law in the 1950's. I turned twenty-one in August of 1959, which meant I could vote for the first time in the coming November if I registered in time. After my birthday, I registered as fast as I could get to the registration office. 

I registered as a Republican mostly because I admired President Eisenhower for his contributions as both supreme commander of the allied armies in western Europe in World War II and President of the United States for the past two terms. 

Out of curiosity, I wondered what President Eisenhower would have to say about our current president when he attacked Iran in mid negotiation. So I looked on the internet. Here are two quotes of the many I found:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense." --speech in Ottawa, Canada, January 10, 1946. 

"War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is black crime against all men." (emphasizing the moral responsibility to avoid war.)

I couldn't agree with him more. 

Eisenhower held a deep conviction that war is both morally wrong and strategically dangerous. He felt that peace, preparedness, and moral leadership are essential to safeguarding freedom and human dignity. My impressions from reading his multiple quotes about war made it clear that his only justification for waging war was in defense from an attacker.

No caring person can honestly disagree with Eisenhower's convictions about war. Why then, I wonder, is Congress sitting on their hands while our president commits piracy on the high seas, and attacks Iran Pearl-Harbor-style in the midst of negotiations?

Something to think about—that's all for today. I'll be back in a few days to talk about other follies Washington D.C. is committing with total disregard for the Constitution and—based on the current ratings of Congress, the Supreme Court, and President Trump—the obvious will of November's electorate. 

—Dan Strawn, American patriot working to Make America Good Again.

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A closing note from Colleen:

Thank you for reading. If this stirred anger, grief, agreement, or pushback, recognize that any of these are normal human responses to abnormal times.

If you’d like a free, relaxed place to slow down and reflect with others—without having to feign certainty—you’re welcome in the online Bowl of Light Café.

Visit SongRise.live and use the Bowl of Light Café link at the top. See you there!

—Colleen Akiko