Isles of Scion

I think there is an incredible untruth in this world: the idea that nothing can really be done to alleviate harm, poverty, and all other negative aspects of life. - Me

  In the US alone, each year 711 billion (and rising) dollars is spent on the military budget. Vast amounts of this money are used to maintain archaic weapons of war and weapons of immense destruction, enough nuclear weaponry to devastate every living organism on the planet lies within the borders of the US alone. Millions are spent each month on dead end projects and used as tokens of appreciation in response to sponsoring a political party or party member. A recently hotly discussed topic was the Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere” which was a 400 million dollar project to connect a single airport and 50 residents of a small pair of islands to the city of Ketchikan, Alaska. While “as far as I know” much of this money was blocked, there was still a road built that cost 25 million dollars and was merely made so that the money quote “wouldn’t just go back to the federal government.”

  So we’ll just use these three incidents, these things that happen monthly in the case of pork barrel spending, and yearly in the case of the US military. Firstly the idea of 400 million dollars for a completely pointless bridge. What could be done with 400 million dollars if spread effectively? Well the WFP (World Food Programme) provides a service where for the purchase of a 60 (51 some places) dollar bag you can feed a single child for an entire school year. Every 5 seconds a child in the world dies from hunger something that people take with stride whenever they hear it. This means that the money to be spent on that bridge could/should have fed 6,666,666 children, at the cheapest I’ve found online it could/should have fed 7,843,137 children. That is almost 8 million children alleviated from the fear of not eating, able to study and help further themselves and in doing so further their own countries. With the 25 million dollars spent on that road they could have alleviated hunger from 490,196 children by being smart shoppers for an entire school year. I find this hardly unreasonable as I can manage for a small bit more than that for a year myself.

  So what is so impossible about this? If we can hand millions to oil companies and millions to building some silly bridge to 50 people, why is it so impossible to feed nearly 8 million? How is it acceptable for this to be the case? When did we begin relying on the mean-world hypothesis to justify all our feelings about things we cannot individually heal.

  The US government alone could alleviate most world diseases and all known world hunger for 195 billion dollars year. This is an astounding number until you realize that this much is spent by the US military on Iraq every hour: 14 Million dollars. That’s 274,509 hungry children that could have been fed every single hour of every single day during this occupation of Iraq. It has been cited on countless newspapers and web sites that the cost of the Iraq war will reach 3 trillion dollars before its end. That’s 3,000,000,000,000 dollars, the most expensive military project since World War II. But we will return to that in a moment.

  We spend 589 billion more dollars on military than our next greatest competitor (in military terms), we spend 641 billion dollars more than our second largest competitor and finally we spend 71 billion dollars more than the entire rest of the world aside from China and Russia. This is absolutely ridiculous. Yet when people are told this they shrug and make a minor disapproving comment. I am starting to feel that I’m the only person anymore that realizes we are in a Democracy. A government that is ruled by the people. 43% of federal taxes goes to the military, nearly half of all the money that the population of the US pumps into the government is spent on sustaining nuclear weaponry (Enough to equate to 150k Hiroshima Sized Explosions), inventing new more efficient ways of killing people, and throughout it all still not appropriately raising the income of the very soldiers that sustain the military. Now in reference to the US Military Annual budget I’ll let a video do the talking.

  http://truemajority.com/oreos/

  I think the flash video here says it better than I can, while the information is slightly outdated in one respect, China outspends Russia on the military budget, mostly thanks to the immense amount of money the US has loaned from China to fund the Iraq war (One of the major reasons we now have a 10+ Trillion dollar debt). However the rest is pretty straight forward.

  When the ball falls, and the fingers start getting pointed it comes down to those who make the true decisions. It is not the job of the government to act with piety, in fact the large complaint of many people is that the government and politics in general are filthy. However this is always used as an excuse to stay out of politics, thusly leaving only the filthy people to participate. We cannot demand the best from our government without choosing the best for our government, if US citizens keep electing greedy uneducated people they will continue to see a government that acts with intense greed and little thought. We decide who lives or dies, as (for now) the worlds most powerful nation, it falls upon us to help the world. If  you treat those around you with respect and help them when they are in a time of need, the will in turn do the same for you. However if you treat those around you as if they are criminals, or deserving of their fates, they will likewise return the favor in kind.

  I don’t want to hear from people anymore that it is impossible to alleviate the issues of the world. If the argument of “Throwing money at things fixes nothing” then why are we spending so much on the military? I feel in the balance of creation and destruction a simple law must be ascertained. We can do as much good as we can do harm, considering that we as a nation have the force to eliminate all life on Earth, likewise we have the power to elevate all life to a level of least agony. How can one nod understandably at the thought of a single bomb killing millions in a few short seconds, but argue against the concept of feeding the same amount.

  Anyone in the educational field especially should not take this view of apathy, because it is the views of the teachers that will in many strong ways adjust the views of the students.