War's Supplemental Sacrifice

When voting on the war, Congress should not get confused. It is about sacrifice and it is measured in dollars and bodies. Thanks to the Black Youth Vote network, Dr. Joe Leonard in Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick's office sent me the Congressional Black Caucus press release and while they say that voting on the escalation of the war in Iraq is a matter of conscience the reality is that it is really more like a math problem where you figure out how much a soldier's life is worth. The supplemental items in the Supplemental Bill enabled me to make my decision.

More than a billion dollars will go to take care of veterans. That is critical. War makes veterans and many with traumatic injuries. This still is not enough to gain my support. Moving down the list there is $4.3 billion for FEMA. My next question is how many are likely to die? This may sound insensitive but FEMA's failure in New Orleans cost lives and there will be other natural disasters so leaving aside emotion this shifts the balance toward support for the bill but I'm still not quite there yet.

Further down the list there is $1.3 billion for levee protection and coastal restoration in New Orleans. Now this is doing the right thing. If the levees and the coast are not restored rebuilding the city would be stupid. I'm almost there and then came a list of items that pushed me over: $30 million for k-12 education, $30 million for higher education assistance (my big issue), $80 million for housing assistance, $400 million for energy assistance, $40 million for Liberia (big support for Africa's only woman president), $1 billion for pandemic flu preparedness, $750 million for State Children's Health Insurance Program (this one saves young lives and turns my support to advocacy), $3.7 billion for Agricultural Assistance (I will check into those cotton subsidies). So the war can be used to get some good work done here at home.

The fact that the war is immoral, ill-conceived, and impossible to win or that we could use the $100 billion far more effectively cannot be factored in because our troops are there. I respect the position that Barbara Lee and John Lewis took against the bill. As a matter of conscience they are on the high road but in this case I have to go with the majority.