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By Ben Cohen
Co-Founder, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream
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On Wednesday, I was arrested at the U.S. Capitol while protesting an issue that affects every American, whether they know it or not.
There are so many terrible things going on in the world that it's hard to take them all in, much less respond to them all.
But there are some things that, for one reason or another, affect each of us more deeply.
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For me, there are two such attacks on justice, common decency, and what I had thought was the American way that are especially troubling.
The first injustice is local. It's an attack on the health of children living in the poorest communities in our country. I was shaken 10 years ago when I first learned about the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, and read that more than 100,000 people—many of them children—were being poisoned by the city's water supply.
Now we're hearing about it in Milwaukee.
Lead poisoning is a pervasive problem in our country. And it is continuing. We know how to eliminate it—it's pretty simple. Replace lead pipes. Remove lead paint. But our country refuses to commit the resources to do so.
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The second injustice is global. It's our government-funded destruction and slaughter of families living in Gaza. Not only is our government funding genocide; it defends that genocide by attacking the basic American value of free speech. Our government is criminalizing the courageous students who have nonviolently protested this inhumanity, which is being done in our name and with our money.
These two things—lead pipes and Gaza—are connected. Every day, our government chooses to buy more bombs instead of replacing lead pipes in America.
It would cost $45 billion to end lead poisoning in the United States and prevent lifelong, irreversible brain damage to children. Some studies show that the cost to solve the problem is far less than the cost of dealing with the long-term effects it will cause.
I know that $45 billion sounds like a lot of money. But it's less than 5 percent of what we spend on the Pentagon every year. And when you realize that we've spent more than $22 billion over the last two years to provide bombs that are being used to slaughter and displace an entire population, it starts to sound like a pretty reasonable trade-off.
But that's not all our government spends money on. We're currently spending $1.5 trillion on a whole new generation of nuclear weapons (that's in addition to our current nuclear arsenal, which already has 50,000 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb). Clearly, we can afford to replace lead pipes.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has been exposed as nothing more than a sham. It worked to destroy many relatively small departments that serve the needs of the American people for a better life—like getting rid of lead pipes that are poisoning communities' drinking water—while increasing the budget for the biggest, most wasteful, most corrupt department in our government, one that accounts for over half of the entire discretionary budget: the Pentagon, formerly known, more correctly, as the Department of War.
I can't witness such extraordinary violence and injustice, call myself an American, and not put my body on the line.
Ben Cohen co-founded Ben & Jerry's Homemade Holdings and recently launched the "DOGE vs. Blob" contest to expose wasteful Pentagon spending.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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