Imagine

Ladies and Gentlemen!! The news is iN. Military spending in the U.S. has surpassed the total spending of everyone else… in the world.

The world spends a total of $1100 billion on Military. The rest of the world (all but USA) spend $500 billion. The United States spends $623 billion.

This information slapped me stunned. Stunned, I feel like I’m in a surrealist painting where the sky is beneath my feet, stunned.
In this feeling of shock, images of last night came up: a dimly lit lounge where a friend gave me a tee shirt with an image of a woman’s profile, holding a baby and a gun slung over the shoulder. I wondered out loud about varying contexts and another friend said:
Guns erase context. In a conflict, everything changes when a gun appears. All of a sudden, everything has to do with the gun.

My thoughts land back to our budget. When in shock, individuals have a tendency to get elemental. I learned how to interact with others on the playground. So I think about the world on a playground and the U.S. being the rich kid with the sharp and menacing objects. Our incredible overspending on the military influences all interaction with our neighbors. We are the playgound bully with the weapons. And we are grouchy, sick and tired. We don’t have accessible healthcare. Our children, if they survive past five, are not the best at reading, science or math. We are distracted so we go shopping or watch tv and eat hormone injected, store bought crap.

This is a bummer of a story.

As it is unsustainable, another story has been emmerging. People gathering together and forging viable local economies are slowly but surely getting themselves ‘off the grid’. People like you and me. So I dream about the possibilities. When we decide to shift at least 75% of our budget to Departments of Education, Culture, Sustainable Economics, The Environment and Peace and Justice, we will be a strong, productive, joyous and generous people. How fun!

I imagine community organizing spilling in and out of our schools and community centers and murals being painted every two blocks. I see free access to healthcare and six months of paid maternity leave and four weeks paid vacation across the country (France already does this). I imagine the army being a place where one learns diplomacy and communication skills -where one studies and trains in the many conflict resolution and transformation ideas and theories available to us. I imagine us leading the trend on demilitarization and ridding of nuclear weapons around the war. (We are currently leaders in militarization and of nuclear proliferation).

We are spending so much money and yet our soldiers are fighting lacking protective equipment and coming back to difficulties in getting the health care they so deserve. We have been engaging in war after war (http://www.neravt.com/left/invade.htm), either against our own people (indigenous, poor and of color) or other nations since the inception of the United States of America. As a human race and responsible members of this society, we must make this a great time of evolving away from our militarized history (check out http://www.addictedtowar.com/).

Last month, I read about a veteran who who spent 15 months in jail, was court marshaled and did not receive benefits for 29 years after serving his country. This past October, it was finally ruled that after a ‘fundamentally unfair and improper’ trial 63 years ago, the 25 soldiers then arrested should be given honorable discharges and compensated. Consequently, Samuel Snow, one of two veterans still alive, got a check. For $725.

While he works on getting a tiny bigger piece of our military budget, I dedicate this posting to him and his family.

Thank you for your service. Thank you for contributing to a country where you no doubt experienced great racism in every aspect of your life. Thank you for not giving in to desperation and doing the same thing to this country as it has done onto you. For you, my neighbors and the future seven generations, I promise to contribute to the shifting of a war and consumer economy that has threatened the existence for our communities and the planet.

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BTW, "the current amount the national debt expands per minute is $1 million, totaling approximately $1.4 billion a day. The debt is up from $5.7 trillion when Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009." (The Progress Report, Center for American Progress, December 3, 2007)