As we watch our western Massachusetts towns struggle to somehow meet the needs of our population with available funding keep this in mind. The proposed military budget for the U.S. for the coming year is over $900 billion, which is larger than the combined military budgets of the next 10 largest nations. Also keep in mind that there is no oversight to this; an attempted audit of the Pentagon budget failed miserably and it is agreed that hundreds of billions of dollars have just disappeared; no one knows how they have been spent or whether they have simply been stolen.
Why does Congress continue to send more and more money to the military when there is no accountability? Simple … fear. They are afraid of being accused of being unpatriotic, for being against the military, which is as close as we come as a nation to a national religion. I think that depriving our population of much needed funding for education, for schools, for food, for housing, and for infrastructure by throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into the black hole that is the Pentagon budget is more unpatriotic than not, and serves no function other than to repay the lobbyists who fund their political campaigns.
This will continue until people across the country elect people who will represent our needs rather than those of corporations and the very, very, very wealthy. I wonder what it will take to get us to actually stand up for our own interests rather than to fight for those in power to continue ripping us off.
Doug Selwyn
Greenfield