BEFORE IT GET TO THIS WEEK’S TOPIC, I want to mention something I wrote last week for which I would like to apologize.

In describing the people with whom I served in the Army, I wrote: “Very few had more than a high school education; even fewer were widely read or thought deeply about U.S. foreign policy, or much of anything else.”

My mother pointed it out to me as an unfortunate turn of phrase, and upon re-reading it, I winced. I didn’t mean to convey that I felt myself superior to them in any way. Quite the contrary: These were men who I am confident would have run through Hell itself to save me if I were in danger, and I would have done the same for them. I learned an immense amount from the people I served with — how to laugh at myself; when to stop analyzing every possible permutation and just Get It Done; what it means not just to be a soldier, but to have integrity and honor, too. I met some of the finest and most decent people I’ve ever known during my time in the Army.

So, I apologize to you, dear readers, and to the men I served with. And thanks, Mom, for calling me on that.

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SPEAKING OF THE MILITARY, I remember a conversation I had with a friend about 10 years ago. I was born in September 1962 and she was born in January 1954, and we were trying to determine the longest period of time since either of us were alive that the U.S. was not involved in direct military action somewhere overseas. The longest period we could come up with was the five years between the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam war in April 1975 and the failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran in April 1980.

I think it is worth asking, why this is so? Why is the U.S. more or less permanently engaged in combat of some sort? And does this reality present any dangers to our society?

This is probably a good place to quote the ancient Greek general and historian, Thucydides: “You Athenians, you cannot have both Empire and Democracy. One must destroy the other.”

Running an empire and being a democracy will always be antithetical to one another, because they have different aims: Democracies are about having a government that is accountable to the people, and empires are about the use of any means necessary, especially violence, to accrue power and advantage.

Our civilization is saturated with propaganda, blaring day and night, that Violence Solves Problems. Movies, television shows, popular novels and video games affirm this principle again and again, to the point that this glorification of violence is, in an odd way, invisible. Maybe events like the Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and Sandy Hook massacres — and the many other massacres that happen regularly in the United States — are telling us to repent of empire, and the attendant violence by which it and all other empires throughout history have survived.

If so, the lesson seems to be lost.

I mentioned in a recent column a variety of policies that are popular but that have no chance of being enacted — raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits being two recent examples. Who is preventing these popular policies from being enacted?

For help answering that question I will turn to Major General Smedley Butler, who at the time of his death in 1940 was the most decorated U.S. Marine in history, including two Medals of Honor. Here is what he said about war:

“War is a racket. It always has been.

“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

“In the World War (Butler is referring to World War I) a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns, no one knows.

“How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

“Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

“And what is this bill?

“This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

“For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.”

There is a word for the “mere handful” who “garners the profits” from constant war. That word is “Oligarchy.”

Oligarchies are ultimately fragile things, for they depend on the silence of the rest of us. When enough of us say “no more” they will have no power to resist. More on that next week.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.