You see this airplane. It’s a United States Air Force B-2 Stealth Bomber. It’s one of the main airplanes that the United States uses to bomb stuff and people.You want to guess how much one of these things cost? Well, they are $1.5 billion each. Each, okay? Billion, not million. That’s an amount of money that most people can’t even comprehend. I mean, let me put it this way. If you had a good job that paid you $50,000 a year and you never had to spend any of it and you could just save all your money all the time, it would still take you thirty thousand years to save up the $1.5 billion to buy your B-2 Bomber.Now whether or not you think that is crazy, I guess that depends how important you think it is to bomb people and things on the far side of the planet with impunity.To some people you can’t put a price on such things.
Excerpt from the Pinky Show
Fact update:
The United States has 21 B-2s in operation. According to the United States General Accounting Office, the real cost for each of these was actually around $2.1 billion after you add in development. That would take 42,000 years at $50,000 without spending any money on anything else.
On April 19, 1953, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his famous Cross of Iron speech:
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on April 4, 1967:
Peace is also patriotic. That's true as an American, but it is even more true as a citizen in the kingdom of God. Let us repent.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.
This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.
It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honest.
It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on April 4, 1967:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.We must repent as a nation. Our desire for violence is coming at a terrible cost. We are broke, yet we still spend more on military spending than the next 14 nations combined. We want to lie about our sin. We want to justify it, but sin is sin. And it can only be dealt with when we acknowledge our depraved state. Justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These are the things that are required from God. We ignore acts of justice and mercy because we are too broke spending on instruments of violence and power. We're broke. Financially and spiritually.
Jesus said:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! Matt 23:23-24 (ESV)
