Where is our heart?

"Where your treasure is, there will be your heart also." Matthew 6:21

Based on CIA data the world spends over $750 billion a year on military preparations. The official budget figures for US military expenditures for fiscal year 2004 was 400 billion. Thus the United States spends more than half of total world expenditures. We all this huge financial the Defense budget, but the U.S. military has much capacities that go way beyond defense, this is a budget intended to project U.S. power and to enable the U.S. administration to coerce nations who would wish to pursue policies contrary to the wishes of the administration.

More than half of the U.S. budget goes to maintain this coercive military presence in the world. Countries that have advanced economies and do not spend their treasure on war and preparation for war are able to afford excellent education programs up to and including higher education, to provide an universal health care, to maintain and renew their infrastructure, and invest in restructuring their economies for the future. But the people of the United States are being reduced to debtors, working long hours to maintain a modest standard of living and watching our nations transportation system, energy grid, and water and sewage system fall apart. Agribusiness is feeding us junk food and we are treating the resulting obesity with more medicine.

To put it gently, our priorities are wrong. The heart of our nation has been seduced by power and we have become addicted to unsustainable ways of living. If the Hebrew prophets called the people back to the covenant, then what is our promise?

I suggest we look at the Constitution of the United States as a covenant document. While not perfect, it is like all committee compromises a reflection of the tensions of the people and the time in which it was constructed. But it provides a good place to begin a conversation, where is our heart?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.