A Beam of Justice Shines Down on Belmont

On an early spring morning, the day outside bright and clear, UUSC Civil Liberties Program Manager Wayne Smith stood at the pulpit of the First Church in Belmont, Unitarian Universalist, in Belmont, Mass., for Justice Sunday. Against the backdrop of a Tiffany window, through which the late March sun shone its beams, Smith got ready to speak, his face and figure limned by the glow of the chalice flame that burned before him.

Reminiscent of a prophet of old, he delivered a jeremiad, asking what we are prepared to do to help those whose lives have been forever changed by the Iraq war. Though he paid a great deal of attention to the people who’ve borne the most immediate costs of the war – members of the U.S. military and their families and the people of Iraq – his overarching point was unmistakable: all of us are paying for this war.

In building his case, Smith cited a list of figures that describe in concrete terms exactly what the dollars spent on the war could have paid for in terms of domestic needs. For the $3 trillion that this war is now estimated to cost, how many millions of Americans could have been provided health care? How many elementary schools could we have built, and how many teachers to staff those schools hired? (Click here to learn more.) Broken down like this, astronomical (and highly abstract) figures like billions and trillions of dollars become more comprehensible, enabling us to grasp the full scope of what has been lost.

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After the service, Smith and fellow speaker Camilo Mejía met with interested congregants for an open, back-and-forth discussion. One congregant raised an interesting point: while she noted the effectiveness of describing the financial cost of the war in terms of forgone social benefits, she reminded the group that the government has financed the war using borrowed money. To the extent that these funds are, in some measure, nonexistent, she wondered about the accuracy of drawing comparisons of the kind that UUSC and others have made. These “could-have-been” assessments may give people the impression that, but for the war, the government would have provided social programs.

As UUSC’s communications director, I’ve given a great deal of thought to this point. Intellectually, I agree with her. These social benefits would not have been provided, because the money to pay for them (or the war, for that matter) only exists as a gigantic footprint of debt. Moreover, if history is any guide, it’s highly unlikely that a Republican administration would have engaged in such astronomical amounts of borrowing to pay for social programs.

As a first response, I would say that to preserve intellectual honesty and rhetorical precision, it is important for us to use the operative verb “could have,” as Smith and others representing UUSC have done, and not “would have.”

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, while it’s true that our government would not have placed a $3 trillion charge on the nation’s credit card in order to provide social programs, that it did so to pay for a war that’s gone terribly wrong is an irrefutable fact. This year, with UUSC’s focus on the Iraq war, on Justice Sunday and at the UUA General Assembly 2008, we are asking Unitarian Universalists, and all concerned Americans, to consider how this reality squares with their values. Does this reflect the priorities of “we, the people of the United States,” to whom is assigned the singular responsibility of ensuring that our government remains by, for, and of the people?

Freedom of inquiry and thought, values of both Unitarian Universalism and our democratic society, oblige us to consider this question – and more: to take action once we’ve found our answer.