Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy. - Derrick Jensen

For what the world spends on defense every 2.5 hours, about $300 million, smallpox was eliminated back in the late seventies. For the price of a single new nuclear-attack submarine, $726 million to $1 billion, we could send 5 to 7.5 million Third World children to school for a year. For the price of a single B-l bomber, about $285 million, we could provide basic immunization treatments, such as shots for chicken pox, diphtheria, and measles, to the roughly 575 million children in the world who lack them, thus saving 2.5 million lives annually. For what the world spends on defense every forty hours, about $4.6 billion, we could provide sanitary water for every human being who currently lacks it. Looking at it another way, the roughly $290–$300 billion that the United States [spent] on defense in 1990 is greater than the total amount that Americans contribute to charity each year, about $100 billion, plus total federal, state, local, public, and private expenditures for education, roughly $150 billion, plus NASA’s entire budget of $7.6 billion, plus federal and state aid to families with dependent children, $16.3 billion, plus the cost of the entire federal judiciary and the Justice Department combined, $5.5 billion, plus federal transportation aid to state and local governments, $17.5 billion. … A single Stinger missile costs $40,000, or roughly 30 percent more than the income of the average American family, nearly twice more than the income of the average black American family, and about 400 percent more than the so-called poverty line … [and] the price of 2,000 rounds of 7.62-mm rifle or machine-gun ammunition, about $480.00, is slightly more than what the average Social Security beneficiary receives every month.” How do we wrap our minds around these priorities? Or

We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal, or to not see it at all. Each new child has his eyes torn out so he will not see, his ears removed so he will not hear, his tongue ripped out so he will not speak, his mind juiced so he will not think, and his nerves scraped so he will not feel. Then he is released into a world broken in two: others, like himself, and those to be used. He will never realize that he still has all of his senses, if only he will use them. If you mention to him that he still has ears, he will not hear you. If he hears, he will not think. Perhaps most dangerously of all, if he thinks he will not feel. And so on, again.

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?