I drove down to the farm last Monday to mow and had to stop at Walmart to buy groceries. There was a woman in there with a little boy who looked to be about three-years-old, not quite ready for pre-school. The boy, like most children of that age, was active, but the mother was so gentle, trying her best to keep him contained without yelling or screaming. We were in the pickle aisle. Just to be clear, I wasn’t looking for pickles myself, pickles being vegetables. I was taking a shortcut through the pickle aisle on my way to the ice cream.
This little boy spied a glass jar of dill pickles and picked it up to ask his mom if he could have it, but the jar was heavy and his hands were little and the jar fell to the floor, where it shattered, scattering pickles everywhere, wall to wall pickles. The boy started crying, just wailing away. The mother handled it well. She explained to him that he needed to be more careful. No yelling, no throwing a fit, just taking the opportunity to teach him a lesson, and when an employee came to clean it up, she had the little boy help clean up the mess he had made. That’s good parenting.
But even the best parents have these little thoughts that we don’t say out loud but we think them so hard other people can sometimes hear them, and when I walked by the mother, I heard her think, I swear, I could hear her think, “This is the reason we can’t have nice things.”
We’ve been talking these past several weeks about war, which we’re continuing today with his observation. War is the reason we can’t have nice things. Since our founding, the United States of America has spent a little over 7 trillion dollars preparing for war, waging war, and paying for past wars. 7 trillion dollars. That’s a seven, followed by twelve zeroes, which means that for the past 250 years, we’ve spent 77 million dollars a day on war, which means war is the reason we can’t have nice things.
Let me share with you an infallible financial principle. We can bank on this. When we say yes to certain things, we are simultaneously saying no to other things.
Saying yes to endless war, the preparation for it and the paying of it, requires us to say no to other and better things. A yes to war is a no to universal health care. There are 71 nations around the world with universal health care, including Pakistan and Rwanda, but since we have said yes to war, we have simultaneously said no to universal health. No universal healthcare for our sickest infants, no universal healthcare for our poorest brothers and sisters, no universal healthcare for the homeless, no universal healthcare for the unemployed and underemployed. All because we have said yes to war.
Saying yes to war has caused us to say no to universal education. Egypt, Malaysia, Kenya and 19 other nations offer free college tuition to all their citizens. We didn’t only say no to universal education, we made 120 billion dollars last year on the backs of college students desperate for an education and the opportunities it provides. No matter their circumstances, we refuse to let them discharge that unconscionable debt in bankruptcy, charging them up to three times the amount of their loan. The average loan takes 20 years to repay, just as they become the signatories on their own children’s college loans, all because we have said yes to war.
Saying yes to war has caused us to say no to our local and national infrastructure. We drive on roads that aren’t maintained; use 42,400 bridges that have been deemed unsafe; power our homes on electrical grids at risk of failure; participate in a financial system that is ever more fragile, designed to protect the rich and neglect the poor; generate waste we cannot safely discard; increase our carbon output jeopardizing our global climate; pollute our streams, lakes and oceans; and empty our aquifers faster than they can be replenished. Saying yes to war and no to maintaining our infrastructure is bringing our nation and world to the brink of collapse.
War is why we can’t have nice things.
Saying yes to war has caused us to say no to the programs that nourish hungry children. New federal laws will slash benefits and narrow eligibility for millions of Americans in the coming years. More children will suffer malnutrition, some of whom will get sick and die who might otherwise have lived, many more will go to bed with empty, cramping stomachs, because we lack the collective will to demand a just and equitable tax system that appropriately taxes corporate and personal wealth and not just income. All because we have said yes to war.
Finally, saying yes to war has caused us to say no to democracy. It has placed upon the poorest and most desperate among us the responsibility of our national defense, those for whom college or vocational training is an unreachable dream. When our son returned from basic training, he said what surprised him the most was how many of his fellow soldiers came from impoverished families. I asked him why there were so many dental offices at Fort Sill and he said because the average recruit had never seen a dentist. As long as we say yes to war, we will say no to the leveling field of democracy.
Thus did Joshua command the fledgling Hebrew nation, “Choose this day who you will serve, decide this day what deserves your yes, and what deserves your no.