A fascinating way to look at the numbers.

Now Democrats, what do you want to do with this information?

What does watching this video essay make you think about? Does it make you want to hold a sign that says “Stop War” on a street corner? Does it make you want to present facts and debate with people who don’t seem to think worldwide sanitation or the rest of these super important things are important? Maybe it makes you want to join the Peace Corp and dig wells. That is all great. Really. Mean it.

But what it makes me think about is, how the hell can the moral rightness of implementing these programs even be questioned? How do we live in a world that is so smart, but so dumb? As part of the reality-based community, this is what we have to face, and figure out how to transform…

So, let’s think together about the underlying connection between the “less expensive” programs. What kind of thinking has relegated these empowering and humanitarian programs to the “less important than weapons” part of our collective political brain? (Now is where some of us will begin to posit vast right-wing conspiracies.) The point made by the video is that if we weren’t spending 1600 black-flagged billions on war, we could afford the good stuff. And I bet most of “us” see the implicit rightness of that premise, and see it so strongly that we under-appreciate the importance of carrying that moral rightness into all our arguments. And, because of this, the reality of today’s politics is that we do not accurately analyze how it is possible that this moral rightness has lost the policy war all over our globe. Over & over we lose our moral authority to be convincing in policy details and segment our thinking into rational arguments for implementation. All that would be great stuff, if the 316 rainbow-flagged billions in the video are ever allocated to be spent.

How do we get it to happen? How do we change minds? This is the question we must answer. Not just explain why it should happen.

What we can no longer afford is to splinter our minds into specific cases involving myriad policy decisions. We have to see that the common factor linking all these programs is empathy and empowerment. When we spend these billions on people, we are consistent with a morality that values humanity. And we must begin to find ways to communicate these moral values and reinforce this way of thinking. Without these fundamentals, we cannot make the changes we know are needed.