Aging & Wisdom Quote by Justin Sane

There is a deliberate plainspokenness to Justin Sane's line that feels like punk ethos translated into policy language. The repetition of "militarism" isn't clumsy; it's accusatory. By refusing to dress the idea up with euphemisms like "defense" or "security", he names the instinct itself as the problem: not a particular war, but the reflex to treat violence as the default tool for complexity.

The phrase "from a very young age" does two things at once. It claims longevity (this isn't a convenient stance adopted when it became fashionable) and it frames anti-militarism as common sense, almost pre-political. That move subtly shames the opposite position: if a kid can see the bad idea, why can't the adults running things? It's a moral biography in miniature, the kind musicians use to authenticate their politics without sounding like they're auditioning for a panel show.

Context matters here because punk and adjacent scenes have long treated militarism as cultural infrastructure: recruiting ads, patriotic spectacle at sports events, the normalization of endless war as background noise. Sane's wording also critiques the managerial fantasy that global problems are solvable through force, as if societies were broken machines you can fix with enough pressure. The emotional undercurrent is fatigue with that fantasy, paired with a stubborn belief that refusing it is not naive, but mature.