Letter to the Mountain Express

In today’s wars, about 90% of fatalities are civilians. At least a quarter of all fatalities from war are children. Meanwhile, about a quarter of all US children live in poverty. I see a connection here: we spend more on our military than any other country. In fact, we spend more on our military than China, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Saudi Arabia combined. If we took even a small percentage of what we spend on our military (which we call ‘national defense’) on our children, there would no longer be any children living in poverty in the USA. Plus, we would no longer be killing foreign children in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen or who knows where. Those five countries are all the countries that Trump has bombed so far. He seems to be intent on continuing some of Obama’s wars. Obama also bombed Pakistan and Libya, and probably Sudan and the Philippines too. I do not understand why US Americans have persisted in ignoring these facts and fail to take action to stop them. We are spending our money on all the wrong things. This is highly immoral, but it is also the stupidest thing I have seen in my entire life.

Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said this on his recent trip to examine extreme poverty in the United States: “The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.”

This is what they said (via email) in response: "Thank you for your email. Our focus at Mountain Xpress is on local and regional issues, so, unfortunately, letters on national and international topics are usually beyond the scope of what we publish."