From the data stream this week, two items are stuck in my brain. First, an article about cobalt mining in Congo, featuring barefoot children, toxic chemicals, and armed guards. Then, on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, the Biden administration released its proposed 2022 defense budget of $750,000,000 (update! 2023 budget: 847b). While perhaps forgettable individually, the two items, blended together, ignited, forming a red-hot conscience-searing ball of shame.
I’m writing on a computer powered by lithium batteries created from these cobalt mines. That’s crazy enough, but then I think about the electric vehicles I’m so excited about, each of which will use hundreds of laptops’ worth of batteries. I may choose to be barefoot while motoring in my Tesla, but shouldn’t the children in the cobalt mines have the option of wearing shoes?
I’ve always been taught to believe that America is a good country, and Americans good people, and then I’m confronted with this flaming affront to our humanity. People talk about the defense budget as an abstraction, but we can note that this amount of money could purchase 10 billion $75 shoes, or 100 billion $7.50 shoes. So our defense budget, if not otherwise allocated, could purchase 10 pair of flip-flops for every person on the planet. Yet these children have no shoes.
I get all worked up about the defense budget, and am puzzled why most Americans seem okay with it. It’s kind of a third rail of politics, but we must understand that its importance goes beyond the “mere” dollar amount. If the United States considers itself some kind of role model, how does it explain spending as much on its defense as almost the rest of the world combined? It’s like a raging alcoholic telling his kids not to drink.
Aside from promoting the idea that killing machines are good and useful, there’s the brutal fact that all this money could be spent elsewhere. I wonder if anyone’s formally compared the benefits of monetary diplomacy and militarism. I’m no social scientist, but there seems to be no contest: $750 billion per year could buy an awful lot of goodwill. No one would be interested in going to war with us.
Instead, we have a world that holds many valid grievances towards the United States, where we in turn seem to feel an inordinate need to protect ourselves. Perhaps we should at least consider “fewer enemies” as a possible defense strategy.
None of this is meant to depreciate the bravery and sacrifice of American service people, both past and present. But everyone involved, from the Commander in Chief on down, might agree that there could be, at least in theory, better ways to resolve our conflicts. As General Eisenhower warned, the military-industrial complex has become a runaway train, and no one knows how to stop it.
In our modern interconnected world, money is the ultimate weapon, and, right now, money is being squandered. It’s not being spent where it should be, and it’s being wasted on vanity and folly. Even if our military might is never deployed, we’ve already lost the monetary battle, through a thousand billion self-inflicted wounds.
Of course, the military isn’t the only culprit here. The manufacturers of our treasured electronic devices also deal in trillion-dollar budgets, and here again we, the proud people of America, come out looking pretty bad. The biggest of these companies, for some reason, are American, which means we have legal and legislative jurisdiction over them – they pillage and plunder with our blessings.
It’s a big country, and I’m just one person. I write my Congressman, and contribute a few words to the digital torrent, and wonder what I could possibly do to induce someone living comfortably near a military base in Georgia to care that five-year-old laborers in Conga are sloshing around toxic cobalt mines with no shoes. Or to encourage civilized people everywhere to rise up against Apple and demand that they immediately divert $50 billion (lunch money) to improving conditions in their supply chains.
The amazing – and encouraging – thing is that the money’s already there, in the US treasury, and on these huge corporations’ balance sheets. It just needs to be directed somewhere smart. Think different, as they say.
So why are Americans – so many professing to be Christians – seemingly so unable to care about the world outside their backyard? They read their Bible, yet somehow fail to grasp its most basic message. Love, charity, forgiveness – I’m sure many Christians work hard to apply these precepts in some areas of their lives. But these things aren’t just for your family and friends; in fact, in Jesus’ view, that kind of love barely counts as love at all. Real love would be expressed towards a person in Congo or Columbia or Cambodia that you’ve never met, who will never be able to repay you.
And to the secular Americans who follow their own moral map, I have to ask, Is this really what you want? Money talks loudly in the secular world, and in the defense industry we have a case of trillions of misspent dollars. Pandemics, climate disasters, mass migration, war: all these things come with hefty price tags – prices that, if we were smart, we wouldn’t have to pay. Ounces of prevention could save us tons of cure. And then, as an added benefit, we could someday stop having to pretend we don’t see or feel these cauldrons of suffering and injustice burning around the world. We could at least buy the kids some shoes.
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