The End of Thought

I know I said earlier that I would stay away from politics here, but recent events in my life and in the news have got me all riled up. Coming this week I’ll be starting a political blog that will catalog my opinions and provide anecdotes from my (potentially) new job with a democratic grassroots campaign.

For now, though, I urge you to read about the cost of the Iraq War. I don’t know the pain of losing a friend or family member to violence, and the true cost of pain due to lives lost couldn’t possibly be measured. What can be measured, however, is the cost in dollars of the war in Iraq. I was furious to hear that 10 to 15 billion dollars had been spent on this war that no one can seem to justify…Imagine how furious I was to hear that it wasn’t 10 to 15 billion dollars total, but 10 to 15 billion dollars a month is spent by our government on the war. I don’t think I can really comprehend that amount of money, but here is one way to look at it…

…if next month, we spent the 10 billion dollars elsewhere, we could:

• Pay the yearly salaries of 200,000 elementary school teachers (at a generous, yet well-deserved $50,000 a year contract)
• Hand out 1 million $10,000 scholarships
• Open more than a thousand elementary schools (at a middle-of-the-road $9 million a pop)
• Pay the yearly health insurance premiums of 2.1 million people (at the average rate of $4000 a person)
• Help the World Bank bring food to impoverished people (Recently, the World Bank has asked for donations from richer countries to help the third world deal with rising food costs.  Their goal is to raise $500 million total.  We could satisfy that goal 20 times over by ourselves if we donated one month of Iraq war spending.)

…and the list goes on. Think of it this way (watch how I bring it back to an entertainment industry blog post). The most expensive movie ever produced was the latest Pirates of the Caribbean at approx. $300 million. Bruckheimer could’ve produced 33 Pirates movies in one month! Think of all the swashbuckling action we are missing out on! Hell, you could produce all of the top 50 most expensive movies and then buy all of the premium advertising time during the Super Bowl to advertise those movies and still have money left over. And that’s just with one month’s worth of Iraq War spending!