April 4, marked the 54th anniversary of the day when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Two generations ago, he warned that a nation which spends more on armament than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. President Biden’s proposed $813 billion military budget shows how completely our government has ignored that warning.

This budget is larger than the military budget was at the peak of the Vietnam War, more than that of the next 11 nations combined, 12 times that of Russia’s, and three eighths of the world’s military spending. It’s more than federal spending on K-12 education, affordable housing, public health, and scientific and medical research combined.

Nearly half that spending goes to weapons makers, and does little to nothing to help the Ukraine defend itself and end its suffering. According to former defense secretary William Perry, lavish spending on a new generation of nuclear weapons has brought the global arms race to its most dangerous point ever, with our chief rivals, Russia and China, following our poor example. During the course of the pandemic, Lockheed-Martin alone has taken in more federal money than the National Institute of Health. While we spend $1 billion a year in international climate aid in the face of a worsening climate crisis, we spend $2 billion per day on a military which is the world’s single largest generator of greenhouse gases.

All this comes to us from too much armor and too little thinking. So: how secure are we now?

John Raby
Westbrook

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