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Military Toys for Boys

I must admit that I loved playing with toy soldiers as a kid – especially when I blew them up with firecrackers and shot them with bee bee guns. But some time around adolescence I stopped playing army.

But just outside Mobile, Alabama the RV Bunny and I stumbled across a bunch of grown men who were still playing army. They had graduated from toy soldiers to real tanks and machine guns. I guess some men love the feeling of power they get from having their own tank or shooting a machine gun firing 1,800 rounds a minute.

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I’m not sure what the permitting or licensing requirements are, but these “hobbyists” own their own private army. They gather all around the USA. We found them gathered at the memorial site of the WWII Battleship Alabama just outside Mobile. I’ll bet they spend lots of time watching the “Military Channel” on cable TV.

Their kids can buy toy machine guns and grenades at the battleship memorial store. I’d imagine they have infant rattles that are shaped like German grenades too. It’s never too early to start bonding with weapons.

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Military Madness

The US now spends more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined. Just who are all these weapons intended for use upon? Or is it mostly about feeding the “Industrial Military Complex”, which retired four star general Dwight D Eisenhower referred to in his farewell speech as President of the US in 1961? For a full transcript of this speech, click here.

Top 15 nations as ranked by military spending in billions of dollars

(Data from the CIA’s “World Factbook 2003″)

Military spend in billions

During the past ten years US military expenditures have exploded from just over 350 billing in 1998 to almost 650 billion as of 2008.

US Militart Spend

Our fascination with military toys is immature and deadly. Perhaps we should befriend the world rather than live in fear of it?

Next Stop – Oliver’s Oyster House in Mobile

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 4:44 am and is filed under Alabama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Military Toys for Boys”

gary Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
just what i want from a travel site…political commentary……ugh!
Peter Luscombe Says:
September 21st, 2009 at 11:56 pm
agreed… I was really enjoying this site till that. Moving on.
YakHerder Says:
April 7th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
You can’t have an honest expectation that “travel” is somehow a non-political category. To ask why some people have the time and money to travel, and the computer literacy to blog about it, is to ask questions that are necessarily political.