Real Change News | Business as usual

July 21, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 29

Rev. Rich Lang

Business as usual

by: Rev. Rich Lang

Like it? Share it!

Our nation has spent $1 trillion on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that number goes up everyday. Can anyone tell me what we’ve accomplished for that massive plundering of our nation’s wealth? Is anyone anywhere any more secure, any healthier or happier? Did our dead die for a noble cause? Did our victims die for any reason other than the profit of a wee tiny elite of demonic death-eaters who control our nation’s sovereignty?

One trillion dollars! Here’s an experiment. Try to count to one trillion. If you start right now, assuming it takes one second per number counted, you would finally reach the goal 32,000 years from today. Don’t believe me? OK – go.

One trillion dollars! Robert Greenwald tells us that, for one trillion dollars, we could hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year, we could fund the clean up of the Gulf oil plague, we could provide health care and build affordable housing units for four million people, provide health care for an additional five million children, hire seven million teachers, fund Head Start for three million kids, generate renewable energy for one million residences, provide university scholarships for one million students and still have $516 million left over to do – whatever.

One trillion dollars but Congress hesitates to extend unemployment benefits. One trillion dollars but no jobs bill, no real renewable energy program, no more sharing of commonwealth with the states to fund education, health care, social welfare and infrastructure. One trillion dollars for war, for plunder, for rape, for murder, for trauma, for lies, deception and the continual despair of a wounded and weary planet that is dying rapidly before our eyes. One trillion dollars to make the banksters happy. One trillion dollars to bribe both political parties. One trillion dollars to drive we the people further into debt slavery. One trillion dollars wasted, squandered, evaporated for nothing but dust and death.

This insanity will only end when we organize with such intensity that the war budget gets slashed, our overseas military compounds get dismantled, and the Wall Street debt cartel is sentenced to life without parole. But that revolution is far from even beginning. In the meantime, we can move our personal assets out of banks, we can shop local, partner with area farms and drill into our kids’ consciousness that war is a racket that only benefits the obscenely wealthy and soulless.

In the meantime the Church can start speaking about systemic sin and the need to dismantle empire. The Church can start preaching and practicing the identical message that put Jesus on the Cross and Paul in chains. In other words, the Church can give content to love with a persistent clarity spoken to the military to stand down and disarm because this war is nothing but sin. And to the nation the Church can preach, “repent.”

----