Ten years after 911

On September 16th I wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle and I said that the thirst for vengance is the not the way of brother Jesus. Returning evil with evil always leads to yet more evil.

Our country has spent two trillion dollars in the ten years since 911 mostly to satisfy our thirst for blood and to calm our fears. For our blood thirst, we invaded two countries and killed thousands of our own soldiers and our "enemies". To "calm" our fears, we spent nearly a trillion dollars on homeland security.

The church was largely silent during this obscene waste of human and economic resources.

It is our responsibility to show that the way of love and compassion is the way of Jesus. The people who sit in our pews have to use our combined power and influence to change the way our country spends human and economic capital.

The politicians lie to us and we let them get away with it. When I speak to church groups I always ask if the people think that our country spends too much to help the poor. The response is a universal "yes".

Then I ask how much do they think we spend. The answers are that we spend somewhere around 20% of our budget on foreign aid.

The next question is, "what do you think we should spend?" Here, most people will say, "no more than 10%."

The entire foreign aid of the United States of America amounts to less than one tenth of one percent of our total budget. 

Americans are good decent people. We want to help but we have been lied to. Imagine what our world would look like if the two trillion dollars we wasted on death and destruction for the last ten years had been spent on projects like those we funded after World War II under the Marshall Plan.

I believe the church has a role to play in these decisions.