By: Marie Goodwin

The mid-term elections are over, and I hear friends saying they feel like they can breathe again. The internet is alive with celebratory exclamations of victory and delightful memes. All I can think of, however, is how our Congress is still bought and paid for by weapons manufacturers and Israel, and that same Congress will soon vote on the largest military spending bill that has ever been proposed. $1.5 trillion of our taxpayer dollars, much of it to continue the war with Iran, arms sales to Israel, the merging of parts of the Israeli military with the US military, a planned war on China, and to continue to saber-rattle, destabilize, embargo, and bully much of the rest of the world.

But as we do our post-election victory dance, are we asking: What else could we do with $1.5 trillion? Why is that?

Let me tell you a story.

I grew up on a small horse farm in rural Georgia. We had one horse who was a troublemaker. He kept breaking down our split-rail fences, pushing his weight against them and snapping their solidness into large toothpicks. He would make his escape attempts only at night, when we were asleep. He was no dummy, that one. He knew no one was watching. Some neighbor would find him grazing in their field or front lawn come morning and call us with the news. We would walk him back on a lead, only for him to do it again another night.

At some point, my father began putting a blinkered halter on him at night, to, quite literally, keep his sights on grazing and away from the greener pastures outside our fence. With the halter on, which narrowed his vision to what was right in front of him, he stopped breaking our fence and trying to make a bid for freedom. He couldn’t see well enough, and his fear and self-preservation instincts kept him confined inside the fence.

The war economy blinkers us all with a halter not unlike the one my father used on that horse. The constraints of war economy thinking lock us into truly believing that our relationships are transactions, our productivity is more important than our creativity, and that imagining peace in our communities and the world is an impractical folly and simply not possible.

But what if the War Economy’s blinkers are a lie? What if we could take off the restraints of a narrowed expectation of what life is and could be and unfetter our communities to create and grow connective tissue of imagination, creativity, abundance, joy, playfulness, and cooperation? What if the Peace Economy is already happening, just outside our vantage point, ready for us to begin? Shouldn’t we consider that there might be more to life than endless war, militarism, consumerism, and fascism?

The truth is, the Peace Economy is already here. It is being created in small pockets and in imaginative communities everywhere in this country. But because our leaders have blinkered halters on, they see only what’s right in front of them. All they know is war, AI, and economic strip-mining. To them, that feels like the logical way forward. It feels normal and natural to vote for militarism instead of supporting peace. The end result is this disastrous 1.5 TRILLION dollar war bill, the effects of which are unimaginable and horrendous.

CODEPINK, along with over 50 other organizations, has launched a Taxpayer Uprising to greet members of Congress as they return to their offices in D.C. this week.

We are going to tell Congress they can no longer use our hard-earned tax dollars for war and genocide. We are going to tell them to support people, peace, and life and not the war machine. We will show, through our actions, that community and connection are alive and breathing, and that life must engage with the world differently. We will show them that communities across the U.S. are ready and able to use this funding to enliven initiatives that build real wealth – people’s health, happiness, and well-being.

What do you think the Peace Economy could do with $1.5 trillion? My short answer is that we could use it to re-localize food, decision-making, healthcare, education, family/community care, and boldly support indigenous and minority leadership and governance throughout the country.

The long answer is something only you can answer for your community. Why? Because every community is different; every community’s needs are complex. There is no one right answer, but having even a fraction of the proposed $1.5 trillion budget to give to communities to solve their problems is a better use than handing it over to billionaire AI developers, the aggression of our armed forces, or to Israel’s genocidal regime.

What would your community do if it had the funding to create peace locally? What would you and your neighbors create? Let’s stop this disastrous war bill and begin imagining something new together. Join us in D.C. or by phone at our afternoon calling parties; sign up here. https://www.codepink.org/novdc26

Marie Goodwin is CODEPINK’s Local Peace Economy Coordinator.

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