Lorraine Monick invited Naomi and I over to her house for a fun blue angels party.
The show was impressive.
They felt close.
Naomi is checking out the toy planes as much as the real ones.
Naomi playing with Logan.
Defense spending for the year of 2010 is between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion and as I enjoy the powerful planes cavorting skillfully over head, I make a mental list of the achievements we would accomplish if we diverted those dollars. ALL of them! Cancer and every other major disease would be cured, education would be reining (and raining) down in every conceivable form as surely it would be free. PhDs would be commonplace. Energy would not be an issue and the abundance of inexpensive power would surely make a massive dent in global poverty and health. Climate change would be faced properly. The arts would florish. We’d switch the recession for a boom overnight. I’m not nervous about America being vulnerable. The thing I am nervous about is the massive waste of this capital. Look at the size of these numbers. In 2011 the budget will be between $1.003 and $1.223 trillion. Our defense spending is almost as much as the rest of the world combined and more than nine times greater than the military budget of China. Of course I know that this isn’t going to happen, but the war sounds varoom-ing above me took me down this dreamy hopeful path with such an intensity.
Then the stunt plane arrived and delivered heart stopping death defying downward spirals. Each time I was sure the pilot was going to crash. I imagined a poof of smoke and big flame of fire.
The stunt plane somehow made it. I am less sure that our nation will.