do you ever wonder how your income tax dollar is spent? national priorities can tell you. you can also go to the federal government's budget website and get the figures there. for the most part they concur.
so what does a government's spending habits say about it? what does the fact that we spend 49% of our public budget on defense and military say? consider what an individual living alone in the wilderness would spend on defense, say in time or in calories, as a percentage of total time and energy spent? more or less? beats me. but, it seems curious to me that defense spending would be so high, considering that as humans we're the top of the food chain and have few natural enemies. so why do we have so many man-made enemies that we have to spend half our budget on fighting them? do we, as a nation, churn them out in some misguided factory, or do they just materialize like the devil? what circumstances allow the enemy to come to power? i'm no history buff, and i'm not very adept at putting the pieces of the world together, but it would seem that there might be some admission in our spending that we're not just innocent bystanders. there must be a reason for others to want to attack us. do we, as a nation, ever reflect on what we're doing that makes it necessary for us to spend half our government's budget on the defense? could that money be spent in some other way that would reduce the amount of defense needed if we changed our behavior? or is the reason we spend so much on defense about funneling public money into the hands of those that profit from defense? so many questions. i'd love an answer. more than that, i'd love for peace to prevail.
i noticed some trees in the fog this morning that sort of look like the national spending profile.
1 comment:
this explanation of the Yama Aparigraha seemed appropriate here...
One who perseveres on the path of non-covetousness gains deep understanding of life (Yoga Sutra 2-39)
Bernard Bouanchaud explains this sutra well in his book "The Essence of Yoga"; Non covetousness consists in not acquiring superfluous goods, nor desiring them, nor accepting gifts beyond reasonable limits... The mor4eone owns, the more one needs to protect it. Accepting more than is necessary and acquiring more and more goods, knowledge, relationships and mystical states clutters the mind and keeps it from grasping the source of things and the motivations and reasons for life. When the mind no longer worries about acquiring and keeping goods, we understand where we come from, where we are, and where we are going. We discover the meaning of life."
Post a Comment