We Get What You Pay For
One month ago, a former Marine, Daniel Penney, killed an unarmed homeless person, Jordan Neely. The 24-year old white Marine choked to death Neely, a 30-year old black man, in a New York City subway car while another rider filmed the killing and two other riders held Neely down. The killing happened after Neely entered the subway car yelling that he needed something to eat and drink and apparently caused enough of a commotion that Penney was disturbed. The Marine was not charged until ten days after he killed Neely, not with murder, but with second degree manslaughter. He was released on bail after he appeared in court.
Although this story has already become old news and won’t resurface unless or until Penney faces a trial, the United State’s debt crisis is breaking news. The stories are related.
The national debt crisis will likely be patched by raising the debt ceiling. The elephant and donkey in the room, however, keep Congress and the President from avoiding the obvious solution to both our national debt and the crises of hunger and homelessness in the richest country in the world. We need to Starve the Military Budget and Feed the Hungry! According to War Resisters League, 80% of America’s national debt is due to the outrageous spending of our tax money on the military.
U.S. taxpayers spent around one million dollars to recruit, train, arm, deploy and retain Daniel Penney in the Marines for four years. That’s a tremendous amount of tax money to spend on one Marine, but according to my research on Quara* and various other Internet sites, that may, in fact, be a low estimate. No one seemed to really know, nor has the Pentagon given an accurate accounting for the tax money it was authorized to spend.
Although Penney’s attorneys assert that he “never intended to harm Mr. Neely and could not have foreseen his untimely death,”** it is hard to imagine that Penney would not have learned as a Marine that a prolonged chokehold would kill the African American Jordan Neely he took down after Neely had irritated him with his screams for food and drink in a New York subway car May 1.
The other thing Penney apparently learned during the four years of his young life in the military—before his brain had even fully matured—***was to devalue and dehumanize the lives of enemies. In the military he may have been honored (and thanked by people back home) if he took part in combat and “eliminated” enemies. Somehow his mindset was supposed to change when he re-entered civilian life. Or maybe not, in our violent and racist culture where the victim was often blamed for his own death because of his mental illness and former criminal history which Penney woul not have known when he attacked Neely.
Now remember, Daniel Penney is not the only Marine the Pentagon has paid for (and who will require more help in the future as they deal with such illnesses as PTSD, moral injury, cancers from toxic substances, and physical injuries. Thousands more soldiers in all the branches of the military are subjecting themselves to bullying, obeying superiors without question, and risking their own lives to fight an enemy that they have never met or know anything about.
Currently our government is struggling to pay its bills and wants to raise the debt ceiling which will cause our children and grandchildren to have to deal with the humongous debt. Congress considered cutting Social Security and Medicare—trust funds whose recipients have already prepaid for their health care and retirement income, that are not to be confused with the general budget that Congress and the President must approve. According to War Resister’s League, the 2024 fiscal year allocates 22 per cent of the national budget for current military spending and another 21 percent to pay for veterans benefits and interest incurred on the national debt due to past military expenditures. This means that U.S. taxpayers pay only two per cent less for the military than they do for human resources.**** The U.S. budgets more than that of the next ten countries with high military budgets combined for its military expenses.
To garner defense industry cash for their election campaign war chests, American politicians have to re-create enemies so that the industries can literally make a killing by selling their products. And so the circle goes around, encouraging us to live in fear that supposedly only more weapons of mass destruction in our hands and those of our NATO allies can relieve.
What if that same million dollars to recruit, train, equip and deploy one marine was used to educate, heal, house, feed, and employ one hungry homeless person, such as the late Jordan Neely?
In New York City, although nearly everything is expensive, $1 million could buy two modest apartments; or 20,000 days of food at $50/day. A million dollars could have made a difference, as well, if allocated for mentoring, counseling, medication, and physical, mental and spiritual care that may have helped Neely heal from the trauma of his mother’s murder.
What if someone had helped Neely find a job entertaining people with his Michael Jackson impersonation in a respectable venue, so that he could have lived above ground and taken enough pride in himself that he may have chosen a drug-free productive life?
Or what if even one person in that subway car had offered Neely $5, a bottle of water, and/or the pizza or some of the groceries they were carrying home, and asked him quietly to take their seat on that fateful night?
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*Many of the writers in Quara (an online publication) who answered questions on how much it cost to recruit, train, arm and deploy a Marine were former Marines who indicated their rank and years in the Marines, but did not always give their names. The range varied greatly, depending on the cost of training high-ranking Marines and equipping them with hardware and software. One million dollars is a conservative amount for the average amount of money spent on each Marine.
** Attorneys’ Statement quoted in The New York Times, online edition, May 11, 2023, 6:36 p.m. ET update.
*** Commonly accepted age for a man’s brain to fully develop is 25 years.
****WRL U.S. Federal budget. “pie chart” for fiscal year 2024.
Yesterday I took some of my own advice when a man came into our subway car and rather gruffly asked for money for food. I dug into my purse for a granola bar and gave it to him. He said thank you and walked the rest of the way down the car and then returned to sit across the aisle from my spouse and me. He spoke quietly to us about directions we needed as he carefully opened the snack and ate it.