The following is a guest editorial written by The Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, pastor of Bainbridge Island’s Eagle Harbor Congregational Church:

During the hour my faith community will be at worship on May 30, our nation will cross an appalling milestone. At 10:06 a.m. Sunday we will have spent $1 trillion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan – not counting interest on the borrowed money’s debt or health care costs for returning vets.

It is an amount so incomprehensible that it can only be understood in terms of what it could have bought rather than missiles and destruction.

For $1 trillion we could immediately give every one of the 15.4 million unemployed people in the United States a $50,000 job and still have $235 billion left over.

We could provide free public university education for the next 24 years to the two million of our children who typically enter college annually.

And those are what we can quantify. What could $1 trillion do for cancer research or alternative energy discoveries or any of a myriad of problems we would like to solve but cannot because of lack of resources?

Wouldn’t we be better off as a nation if we were spending limited funds on more humane programs? Wouldn’t we be better off as a human race if we could find more peaceful ways to settle conflict than this incredibly wasteful, immoral, outdated tactic of war?

If we are not stable economically, then we are not secure as a nation. We are now on our way to the next trillion. This hemorrhaging of our collective resources for war has to stop – now.

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Correction

• To clarify information in last week’s story on the new Wilkes School’s design, its gym will be about 5,040 square feet, which is 1,500 square feet larger than the current gym.