Ramifications of not living in Peace

On a darker note, my community of Portland OR could have sent 27,000 students to public university on a four year scholarship, for the locally subsumed debt of just one of our current wars. This is more than the number of students that attend the university full time. How can we afford to sacrifice this much education, indefinitely as the politicians are discussing. I am not talking about the national cost of war categorized at a local level, I am talking about the local impact of the war. Our community made a choice to pay for war, and sacrifice the free college education of 27,000 students, or 9,500 public school teachers, or to not provide health insurance to over 300,000 children.

Never in my lifetime have I ever even used the phrase, "just one of our current wars", until now.

As I see it we have sacrificed the education or health of our own youth, all for the privilege of killing hundreds of thousands, injuring millions, displacing millions from their homes, leaving tens of millions without the basic necessities of adequate food, clean water, electricity, and sanitation. Theoretically, based on one of the excuses for the war, we did this so we could save the lives of thousands who might have died at the hands of a dictator, who shortly before the war was one of our top 5 best weapons customers.