Dan Pallotta

1.24.2004

Saturday, January 24, 2004

The Los Angeles Times reports that the President has asked for a 7% increase in the defense budget - $37 billion more - bringing it to $402 billion. Amazingly, this does not include the cost of the war in Iraq which is an additional $50 billion, which the President will request in a budget supplement after the election. Nor does it include the massive budget supplements of $75 billion that have already been spent to prosecute the war in Iraq. And this of course, does not include the $87 billion the President just asked for and got for Iraq. All added up, the new military spending - just the new spending, for Iraq and the Defense Department totals $249 billion.

What is outrageous is not that Howard Dean flies off the handle over the war in Iraq. What is outrageous is that nobody else does.

We are spending more on Defense now in time-adjusted dollars than we did during the Cold War. So what good was it to win the Cold War? Was not the victory over communism supposed to make the world safer? And isn't the benefit of a safer world that you don't have to spend as much money on safety? That you can instead begin to spend the money on education and compassion and the arts? Isn't that supposed to be the benefit of a safer world? This is the fallacy and the lie of the military state. The world doesn't get safer as a result of all this spending. It just keeps getting more dangerous, and we have to spend more and more money to keep the level of our safety even. It is not a safer world if you're spending twice as much to keep it as safe as it was twenty years ago. It is more dangerous. And the more you spend to make it safer, on new robotic spy planes and new fighter jets, the more creative the terrorists and others get, and then you have to spend even more to keep it just as safe as it was yesterday.

This is exactly how the psychotic mind works too. There is always a new enemy. End the Cold War and then terrorists pop up. End terrorism and then some new threat will pop up - China, or weapons in space, or who knows what. Can't we see that it never ends? There is no safety at the end of the Yellow Brick Road of ever-increasing military spending. In fact, the ever-increasing military spending, as a strategy, is making the world less safe and more and more expensive to keep safe. This is the price of hatred and violence. This is the price of throwing weapons at problems instead of real thought and real reflection. And the writing on the wall is that it will get more and more expensive to keep the world safe until one day we won't have any money to spend on anything else. The Los Angeles Times also reports that Pentagon wants to increase the military budget to $484 billion annually by 2009 - just five years from now. It is happening before our very eyes and no one is screaming about it.

They're telling us that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein. But they're not telling us that it cost $249 billion to make it safer. Was Saddam Hussein really a $249 billion threat? If we hadn't used the military budget to support Hussein in the first place twenty-five years ago we would never have had to spend $249 billion to get rid of him. And what future $249 billion problems is the Pentagon creating for us now with its paranoid mind?

Do we know what we could have done with this extra $249 billion? Well, for $30 billion we could have gotten protease inhibitors to everyone who died of AIDS last year and we could have saved their lives. That might have made Osama Bin Laden think twice about trying to destroy us. Then for another $2 billion we could have provided food to the 6 million starving children around the world. That might have made Bin Laden think three times. We still have $217 billion left. We could have given $40 to each of the world's poorest people. For people like those living say in Bangladesh, who make eighteen cents an hour, that amounts to a month's wages. That would have made Bin Laden think four times. That leaves us with $97 billion. And we would still have a $375 billion defense budget! With the rest of the $97 billion, we could cure cancer and permanently end world hunger, and fix the American public education system and provide healthcare to every child in America. Wouldn't that be a smarter defense strategy than the psychotic one we have and that we keep letting them spend more and more money on?

The bottom line is frightening - the more money we spend on defense the less safe we become. It is the opposite of what we are being told. But exactly what George Orwell predicted.

It is up to us to change this, and the hour is growing late. The greatest obstacle that confronts us is our own belief that we are powerless to change it. The sense of inevitability is our greatest enemy. But it is no match for the strength of the human spirit and the power of people united in a vision of compassion. There is reason for great hope. If we choose to act, we can win. The greatest threat to that hope is simply that we will do nothing. Because once we are engaged, there is no stopping the positive creative energy of the human race. All of the energy we have put into this madness we can unleash unto a new sanity. All of these dollars that we have directed to destruction we can direct toward building and creation. All of our fear we can transform into imaginative possibilities and new plans and visions for a spectacular new world. Tanks can be turned into schools. Bombs can be turned into medical clinics. Spy planes can be turned into sight-seeing hot air balloons. This is not crazy. The way we are living now is crazy. This future is our birthright and the time has come for us to claim it. And when we have, we will look back at the relic of our old thinking - the Donald Rumsfelds and the Dick Cheneys - and perhaps they will even look back at themselves - and say, thank God we delivered ourselves from that hell. On that day, we will be able not just to think about how to spend the extra $249 billion the Pentagon has asked for, but how to spend the $375 billion in their normal annual budget, because there will no longer be a need for it.

1.23.2004

Friday, January 23, 2004

John Edwards was the only candidate in the debates last night who was willing to put his ass on the line for the 35 million Americans living below the poverty line. He admitted that it was not a popular issue but that we should be talking about it, saying that the existence of the problem was "wrong," "morally wrong." Understanding that it is not a popular issue among Americans, and not wanting to forfeit time on the more popular issues that can bring them votes, none of the other candidates spoke about it or showed any signs that they wanted to. It could be a popular issue in America if people in leadership would begin talking about it. It should be a serious issue in the wealthiest nation on earth and in history that over ten percent of its population lives in poverty. John Edwards also referenced the fact that many of these people work. They work full-time in minimum wage jobs and they still live below the poverty line. Some of them work two jobs. John Edwards was willing to expend political capital for the sake of his conscience. He was willing to speak for the downtrodden and the abandoned from whom he will likely see no votes. He was willing to do it because it's the right thing to do. This interests me in his candidacy a great deal.

Reverend Al Sharpton spoke about the need to bring "trade and aid" to the developing countries of the world - not to intimidate the rest of the world with our military might - not to show the world we are a super-power all the time, but to "show them we can be a super help." He's not going to get any votes from the people in the developing countries of the world, so it was a courageous thing for him to speak on their behalf.

Dennis Kucinich spoke about the need to turn our educational system on its head, eliminate mandatory testing that forces teachers to teach to the test, and instead, bring out the creativity of our students by immersing them in music and the arts.

In each of these candidates are the kernels of enlightened ideas.

I envision the evolution of these kernels - the integrated enlightened candidate who will come out and say that the Defense Department is a disastrous way to defend the United States - that we need to seek a new foreign policy of love - that we need to gradually dissolve the Department of Defense and replace it with the Departments of Compassion and Food for the Hungry. The candidate who will say that we need a campaign of kindness, and who will come on the television from time to time to remind us all to try to be kind to one another, just for that day, and watch the real beauty of the American spirit flower. The candidate who will establish an unbelievably bold goal for the eradication of AIDS and the cure of cancer. The candidate who will call for pilot testing of meditation programs in prison. The candidate who will inspire all wealthy Americans to take on a mentoring role with a child from the inner city - not just mention the word "mentoring" in a State of the Union address, but get on national television to give an undivided speech on it - make a call to arms that has the mentoring hotline ringing off the hook the next day. The candidate who will bring up in ourselves the desire to e the best we can be, and recognize that along that path lies our true happiness.

Perhaps that candidate has to rise up in each of us. Perhaps we need to elect ourselves to that position.

1.22.2004

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Freedom is a wonderful thing for America to spread around the world. I'm all for it. But freedom is not necessarily a political objective. The Bush Administration plays on our patriotism and our love of the word "freedom" to get us to back all kinds of political initiatives that have nothing to do with freedom. Let's face a few basic truths. You can't be free if you have nothing to eat. You can't be free if you have AIDS and no AIDS medication. You can't be free if the only water you have access to is polluted. You can't be free if you have to work three jobs and still can't pay your rent. If America wants to make people free, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. We don't need to start off by over-turning dictatorships. My guess is that the starving people in the dictatorships of Sub-Saharan Africa don't much care what form of government they have. They'd rather just see a bag of rice and a jug of clean water.

The United States could bring freedom to hundreds of millions of people by making it our objective to end hunger as a basic issue in the developing world. The United States could bring freedom to 3 million people who will otherwise die of AIDS every year by getting them protease inhibitors and setting up small clinics in which to administer them. The United States could bring freedom to the kids in the American ghetto by repairing the broken public education system. But we don't. And the reason we don't is because we are unwilling to take $10 billion or $20 billion from the gargantuan $400 billion annual defense budget to accomplish any of these things.

So, the Department of Defense - the very thing we think will bring freedom to the world - is actually obstructing it. In terms of obstacles to freedom, nothing else comes close. It is an idol to our fear, not to freedom. And it is of monstrous proportions. And the frightening thing is that when you put that much energy into your fear, the thing you fear most usually manifests itself.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Sorry for no post - I was celebrating my birthday. It's good to have been born, yes?

1.20.2004

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

There is a very interesting documentary out right now by Errol Morris called, "The Fog of War." It's an intimate portrait, in only the way Morris is capable of getting intimate, of Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. It offers insight into how nations get into debacles that esacalate and get beyond them. It is about the future of war. It is about how the dangerous power of misunderstanding created the disaster of Vietnam. And it is about how absolutely nothing has occurred since Vietnam that would prevent these things from happening in the future on a much more horrific scale.

1.18.2004

Monday, January 19, 2004

Brilliance is courage. Courage is brilliance. Brilliance is not intelligence. Brilliance is not intellectual genius. We all too conveniently call courageous action brilliance, leaving the word courage out of the equation entirely, as if brilliance were simply a matter of brain power. And then, since so few of us have the intellect of a genius, we are relieved of all responsibility to be brilliant ourselves. We can't. We lack the endowment. So we tell ourselves. But brilliance is almost always a matter of having the courage to let go the past and let go petrified opinion and venture out boldly into the unknown - to leave all convention and all practicality and all of what passes for reason far, far behind - no matter what the cost to our personal reputations - and to dare to think anew. It is to let go the safety net of homogeny and mass acceptance, and to dare to be outcast for radical new thought. This is brilliance. And it can be exercised by a preacher as easily as an intellectual giant. This is the lesson of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Just because we admire our heroes doesn't mean they admire us. I am certain that Martin Luther King, Jr. would much rather that we act courageously in the name of something in this don't-rock-the-boat, cover-your-ass world of ours than put the burden on the shoulders of his memory while we absolve ourselves of any duty to act as boldly as he did in the name of some cause - any cause. He has already done his part. This should be a day not for us to rest, but for his memory to rest and for us to rise up, to stand for something, to generate the courage to have courage, and work to be the hero we admire in him. That is what would truly honor his life. That would be brilliant.

Sunday, January 18, 2004

Strangest thing - I just went back and reviewed the 17 posts prior to today that I wrote for January. On nearly all of them, I had written the year as 2003. How unconsciously we live in the past!

I have corrected the dates to read "2004" and from here on out will try to live in this year, until this year is over, that is. In any event, the past is definitley over, so I will try to stay out of it. As for the future, well, that does not exist, so I will try to stay out of that too. That only leaves me with the present, and we have been conditioned to avoid that at all costs. This is perhaps why life is so difficult. Maybe I should just label each post "now"
from here on out, since that is definitely when I write it.

Saturday, January 17, 2004

"God waits on human history
and suffers as she waits."

Meister Eckhart