Spiritual death is the attitude that it's fine to keep the U.S. economy running on the coffins of hundreds of thousands of our neighbors. Spiritual death is the complacency that the use of weapons in mass murder or the killing of individual African and Native Americans and transgender humans is normal. Spiritual death is placing immigrants, men, women and children into cages, or flying them infected with a contagious virus back to countries too poor to deal with pandemics.
Even before COVID-19 threw the U.S. economy into a steep downward spiral, New Haven city government was contemplating a significant tax increase on top of further layoffs and cuts in service.
The pandemic, however, has burnished in stunning relief the absence of real security all of us confront, health security, employment and income security, safety from overwhelming, unpayable debt, safe working conditions. It has redefined for us who are indeed the essential workers and pointed to their often unlivable, appallingly low wages. It has made us feel threatened by neighbors passing by on the sidewalk.
In short, the pandemic has grabbed and refocused our attention on what our country's priorities should be in contrast to what they currently are.
Instead of hundreds of billions of dollars annually shoveled to the maw of the Military Industrial Complex, we could have a different society. Imagine if the $15 billion Connecticut taxpayers sent in 2018 to the Pentagon, the greatest single polluter and emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, were spent on jobs building a sustainable energy economy in our state. Imagine how the $160 million that New Haven's taxpayers sent to the Pentagon could fund educators, first responders, paving roads, and inspecting housing for lead poison.
Connecticut actually sends much more money in taxes to Washington than it receives in federal funding, $8 billion more. Our state would look a lot different if we were building bridges instead of bomber engines, funding schools instead of submarines.
Members of Congress and the mass media ask where the money will come from to fund Medicare for All, but they never ask to source the annual killing budget. The government response to COVID-19 drove businesses to close and employees to unemployment. Yet Congress and the President rapidly located trillions of dollars to hand to big corporations and some to supplement poverty incomes, we should have no doubt that there is money for all the urgent needs of our communities: Conversion from the genocidal fossil fuel industry to a Green New Peace Deal; jobs rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, redirecting the vast treasure from promoting death to ensuring health; eliminating lifelong education debt and funding full-life education; eliminating evictions and foreclosures and instead guaranteeing decent housing; and replacing clogged streets and fragile bus and train systems by constructing high quality public transportation.
New Haven's proposed referendum opens a desperately needed discussion on where the wealth of the wealthiest nation in history ought to be directed. It allows us to demand our members of Congress rethink the broad consequences of their votes: Spiritual death or healthy lives.
Henry Lowendorf is Chair of the Greater New Haven Peace Council.
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