"The 2006 budget showed that US military expenditures were twenty-one times larger than diplomacy and foreign aid combined, and that the United States was dead last among the most developed nations in foreign aid as a percentage of gross domestic product. One wonders what would happen if good-hearted Americans realized that a mere 10 percent of the US military budget, if reinvested in foreign aid and development, could care for the basic needs of the entire worlds poor."
"Even if you take all the rest of the world's weapons sales and put them together, they don't match US weapons exports. My country can boast that we produce 53.4 percent of the worlds weapons. Most Americans are either uninformed about these figures, apathetic, or perhaps they believe that McNamara was more rational than President Jimmy Carter, who in 1976 saud "We can not have it both ways. We can't be the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of arms."
"It gets worse. In 2003, 80 percent if the top buyers of US Weapons (twenty of the twenty five top clients) were countries that our own State Department labeled undemocratic or countries known for their failure to uphold human rights, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1999, the US weapons industry supplied arms to 92 percent of the conflicts in process anywhere on the planet, and in a stroke of elegant fairness, often supplied both sides in conflicts. Perhaps most shocking and awful of all:between 1998 and 2001, the United States, Great Britain, and France earned more income from selling weapons to developing countries than the gave those developing countries in aid"
(all of these passages in quotes are take from 'Everything Must Change' by Brian McCalren with annotated sources in the back of the book.)
What if we had a President who stood up against this and perhaps wanted to talk conflicts out, through diplomacy, rather than immediately going to war and perhaps saving us from the deaths of nearly 1,000,000 Iraqis and 4,000 Americans among the countless others who we have supplied arms to. If we as people have any compassion and love for the rest of the world we have to stop voting for policies that contradict the love, humility, meekness and forgiveness that we are taught through Jesus.
We would be in a far better place than we are right now not only in our country but also in our world. I read this passage in a book im reading right now and it fits perfectly in describing this moment "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." -Tolstoy
