Tread lightly on the things of earth

The U.S. media blasts its definition of “patriotism” into our lives, and thereby creates lots of U.S. peer pressure to exhibit “patriotic behavior.” But intellectual honesty compels me to examine the costs and benefits of that collective “patriotic” behavior before I can assent to it. Just a few gathered notes/thoughts:

Financial cost? RonK points out the Concord Coalition’s Pete Peterson’s congressional testimony that “in just two years, America has witnessed a $10 trillion projected deficit swing.” This $10T is the total of the 2001 Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year projected budget surplus of $5.6 trillion, now evaporated, plus the CBO’s current 10-year projected ~$2 trillion deficit, plus estimated war-related costs that push the 10-year projected deficit to more than $4 trillion.

How much is $10 trillion?

Here’s one way of bringing it down to personal scale. There are roughly 100 million households in the USA. $10,000,000,000,000 [$10T] divides out to $100,000 per household [for every household in the USA].  …

Here’s a more concrete benchmark: the replacement cost of America’s housing stock — every house, duplex, condo, apartment and trailer, from sea to shining sea — is roughly $10T.

[See revised deficit total in update note below.]

Human cost? Yesterday’s CSMonitor says “Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war.”

Corroborating that, today’s count at the Iraq Body Count database is 5,334 (min) to 6,942 (max) civilian Iraqi deaths.

Add to that number U.S. and coalition deaths (196 so far), plus the ongoing counting, plus the ongoing dying; let’s estimate 7,000 dead as a result of recent U.S. action.

How many is 7,000 dead people?

Bellevue Baptist is a massive church in Memphis whose leadership happens to be, as I understand it, in favor of war. According to this Googled link, Bellevue’s seating capacity is 7,000.

So imagine a packed house at Bellevue, say, on Easter Sunday morning, standing room only. An ocean of people. Lots of life, lots of hope, lots of plans for the future.

That many people, then — all innocent, all alive on March 17. All dead now.

Benefit?

• Are we safer now? Apparently not.
• Have we unearthed and disposed of Iraq’s stash of the “most lethal weapons ever devised”? Have any at all been found? (Molly Ivins comments interestingly.)
• Are the Iraqi people better off? Alongside grieving dead (and maimed) family members and friends, they’re also now having to deal with lawlessness, starvation, and long-term toxicity.

The costs are staggering. The benefit is elusive. The people are dead.

Hence, given its costs and outcomes, I can’t in good conscience engage in U.S. media-defined “patriotism.” I can, however, engage the more comprehensive task of being a here-and-now activist citizen of God’s kingdom. This citizenship steers in a different direction altogether; it transcends national boundaries, sees life and creation as holy and, as mysteriously conveyed in Jesus’ gospel parables, intrigues me no end.

Hmmm, I remind myself of a song I love by Peter Mayer, Everything is holy now (MP3 sample).

2003-05-29 update: According to Financial Times article US ‘faces future of chronic deficits’, the U.S. financial situation is much worse than I knew last week:

The Bush administration has shelved [and omitted from the FY2004 budget report] a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current US dollars.

Note that’s $44 trillion in deficits over the span of time being projected. And we’re slicing revenues further by enacting a tax cut? Can there be any doubt that “the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum”?

See also Boston Globe editorial An economic ‘menu of pain’ by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University, and Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University.

I’ll post more details as I see them.