David Swanson, his talkings titled Why and War. Every person outside of Charlotte's bill that I've asked has had no idea that the reason a statue of Robert E Lee is still standing in this city, albeit covered in black plastic, is because of Virginia law bans the removal of war monuments. And I've never met anyone who has even considered banning the removal of peace monuments. The hardest part would be finding a peace monument to remove. If we removed only the racist war monuments in Charlotte's bill, we would lose Lee, Jackson, the generic Confederate, the people who held slaughter native Americans, the memorials of the war that killed some 3.8 million Vietnamese, although Vietnamese was not always the term used to refer to them. And the UVA monument to World War I, a war explicitly marketed as a war against the evil race of Hunts. In other words, we would lose all the war monuments. I want to propose something harder that we rid ourselves of war. The American Public Health Association calls militarism a public health threat. Gallup polling finds majorities around the world say the United States government is the top threat to peace on earth. Why? Well the US spends a trillion dollars a year preparing for and fighting wars. 3% of that could end starvation. 1% could end the lack of clean drinking water. A bigger fraction could give us a chance against climate change. War kills. And it kills even more through the creation of famines and disease epidemics in places like Yemen and most of all through the diversion of resources from where they're needed. Totally destroying North Korea. Totally restore Puerto Rico. It's our choice. Wars victims are mostly civilians. War generates enemies. Terrorism has predictably increased throughout the war on terrorism. Militarism is a top destroyer of the natural environment. It reduces jobs. It fuels the cultural violence. It erodes our civil liberties. It militarizes our police. It gives Charlottesville a line-resistant vehicle. Raise your hand if you have never stepped on a landline in Charlottesville. War is not needed. Its presence is sporadic through history, virtually absent from prehistory, and unrecognizable in its current form from just a few centuries back. Intense conditioning is required. Higher suicide rates result and not a single case has yet been found of PTSD from war deprivation. Since World War II, the United States has bombed over 30 countries, killed or helped kill some 20 million people. The US provides training or weapons to three-quarters of the world's dictatorships. Many wars now have US weapons on both sides. We know we have a racism problem. Do we realize that we have a militarism problem too? Maybe we would if we had any monuments to anything else. What about a monument in Charlottesville to civil rights? How about one for labor? One for women's rights, one for the environment, one for education, one for art, one for music? How about a monument to our sister cities? How about a monument in Charlottesville to peace?