We deserve better, I think

I couldn’t sleep on the drive to Ohio even though long road trips usually put me to sleep instantly. The roads through northern Indiana aren’t the greatest, potholes and uneven pavement rattled the bus every few seconds and would jolt me back awake. We were our way to a counter assembly to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Spring parliamentary meetings in Dayton, Ohio. I was thinking of my grandpa, who died when I was about twelve. He suffered from Alzheimer’s and my older sister recently told me that in his fits of confusion, he would speak Serbo-Croatian. Five years before I was born, NATO “negotiated” the peace accords to end the war in Bosnia that allowed NATO troops to occupy the country past Yugoslavia’s dissolution. When I would ask my grandpa where his family was from, “Yugoslavia” was usually the only answer he would give me.

I’ve loved finding reasons to travel around the midwest, but I can’t say I was thrilled that this time, it was because NATO was in town.

I love living in the midwest. I love the people that live here. I’ve loved traveling west through Minnesota and north through Wisconsin. Whenever I drive east through Indiana I see a microcosm of disinvestment — a symbol inside a country that’s funneled all its money towards war instead of investing in its own heartland. And in case a forest reserve off the side of the highway made me forget how little our government cares for us, the bus hit another gaping pothole.

NATO is boring. It benefits from people being bored by it. Much like the war industry generally, it benefits from the disinvestment in human life it creates — people in this country are far too consumed with piling up bills and trying to keep their head above water than they are with a treaty organization. Who can fault them? This sort of precarity can only breed a lack of imagination for a better life. Last week I waited thirty minutes for a bus that never showed up.

“We deserve a bit better than this, I think.” I stated, mostly in frustration to the stranger who waited with me.

“Ah, you know how it is.” He said, also in anger.

The U.S. war machine is made up of a handful of different institutions — NATO being one of them. NATO is self-sustaining in so much as it provokes wars, forcing member states to stock up on weapons (almost always from the U.S.). The U.S. has to keep the weapons flowing, since it’s one of our biggest industries, so it keeps pushing NATO to expand. In some cases, like in Yugoslavia and Libya — it goes to war in a manner I can only describe as scorched earth. Then the stockpiles need to be replaced, so they take money out of our paychecks to buy bombs instead of fill potholes or let us go to the doctor for free or insuring housing is a human right.

We deserve so much better — and NATO is not only an obstacle to that better version of our lives, but an active reason why it’s so far out of reach.

In between sessions I stopped out in the parking lot to get a hot dog. The man making and selling them told me he had met me before, which was shocking since it was my very first time in Ohio. We had met somewhere around October 6, 2023 in Washington, DC — before the political conscious of the entire world flipped upside down.

On the ride home, the roads running west back to Chicago were somehow even more bumpy. But the sky went on forever, and when the sun went down it looked like the midwest sky was on fire. It felt like I was watching a pink flame burn out slowly, until it disappeared.