All your fault: All your opportunity

It's all the fault of the consumer and the homeowner. That is the normal redirection from elite war profiteers. Lead in your child's blood that leads to sickness and loss of IQ? That must be because you allowed that child to eat paint chips from old paint that contained lead, or because you didn't replace your plumbing pipes.

Turns out that a significant source of lead in groundwater and surface water is from weapons manufacturing (Anielak & Schmidt, 2011).

So what? We need those weapons. We never know when Putin might send in masked men to a Russian enclave such as the New York metropolitan area, where there are more of the 851,174 Russian-speaking immigrants than anywhere else in the US. Hey, for that matter, Putin may have also targeted Pikesville, Maryland, or possibly Wishek, North Dakota, two more communities with concentrations of Russian-speaking immigrants. From South Ossetia to Crimea to eastern Ukraine to Eureka, South Dakota--you never know who or where is next. So we must remain ready, weapons stockpiled and more to come. And if some of those weapons or any of that ammunitions gets a little past their expiration "best if shot or launched by" date, we need to destroy them and make more. Any pollution is irrelevant and besides, the feds have made promises (Powers, 2005). You can trust them. They promised that the nuclear weapons pollution would be all contained and cleaned up by 1998, so why worry?

Might there be another way to handle conflict? Some way that doesn't involve so much dirty killing industry?

Civilian-based defense is the ecological choice and the human life choice. It is in fact up to us indeed. We can let the military go, stop the arms manufacture, revoke the Second Amendment, and train ourselves in nonviolent defense of our land and communities. This will be a complex process. We should get started.

References

Anna M. Anielak, Rafał Schmidt (2011). Sorption of Lead and Cadmium Cations on Natural and Manganese-Modified Zeolite. Polish Journal of Environmental Studies, 20(1), 15-19.

Powers, M. (2005). DOE Pledges 'Fence to Fence' Cleanup of Los Alamos Site. ENR: Engineering News-Record,254(10), 14-15.

Sharp, Gene (1990). Civilian-based defense: A post-military weapons system. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.