Think of all the things we could have used that money for: funding education, free healthcare, roads, bridges, curing cancer, you name it. That was our money. We’ll never know what they spent it on and we’ll certainly never see it again.
You can learn a lot about a person by understanding what their priorities are. The same can be said for a country, which doesn’t bode well for America, what with our priorities being nowhere near what we should be able to expect them to be. The truth of what we’re collectively willing to spend our money on reveals us to be a callous, intolerant lot far more comfortable with killing foreigners than with helping our own.
Shouldn’t we be able to expect that our tax dollars would be put to use here at home, in order that America might be a better place? I know; I can be SO naive sometimes….
Before I get too far along, I thought it would be useful to consider the sheer, almost incomprehensible immensity of the amount of money we’re talking about here: four to six TRILLION dollars. I find it more impactful to see the numbers: $4,000,000,000,000 to $6,000,000,000,000. If that doesn’t bend your powers of comprehension, this just might: If you converted four billion dollars into one-dollar bills and laid them end to end, you’d circle the earth 15,212 times. I find these mathematical gymnastics helpful in trying to wrap my head around the fact that we’ve spent an INSANE amount of money on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with little in the way of protest. Yet the suggestion that we spend even a fraction on social programs here at home is met with cries of “SOCIALISM!!” Call me silly, but how can we collectively be good with spending trillions to kill people overseas, but thoroughly offended by the idea of spending a fraction of that amount to care for our own?
Martin Luther King, Jr. has been dead for 46 years, but the world he decried could just as easily be the world we live in today. I’m no Mother Teresa, but you don’t have to be to wonder why military spending is accepted without question while spending on social programs is beyond the pale. It’s not about “socialism,” or “fostering a culture of dependence,” or even Americans “sucking at the government teat” because they’re too lazy to work. If we can’t find the resources to feed, clothe, educate, and provide medical care for those in need, but can always find the money for another weapons system…. MLK was right; we may well be approaching spiritual death.
You don’t have to a saint to recognize the convoluted priorities we labor under. We resist prying money loose for education, health care, infrastructure, and other programs vital to America’s future. We fail to recognize that these are the investments that will provide the biggest bang for our buck over the long haul. We refuse to see investing in America as a long-term proposition. What we see are people too lazy to work because they’d rather live life on the dole than do for themselves. Yet we can throw billions, even trillions of dollars into the means and methods of killing and destroying on a massive scale. Something is horribly askew when when we undeniably value killing people above saving or even assisting them in a time of need.
It’s easy to hold others in disdain when you’re not in their shoes, when you know where your next meal is coming from because you have a steady, dependable paycheck. It’s far more difficult to recognize that spending on social programs and infrastructure will make America stronger in the long run. The words of Benjamin Franklin are truer today than ever: “If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”
America is a country, not a place where 300 million people call home. If we can’t find it within ourselves to care for Americans in their time of need, if we’d prefer our tax dollars be spent on the military, we’re a sick society with some distressing priorities. And we may well be on our way to hanging separately.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
