The Bush administration has proposed a $614 billion military budget–which does not include the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only is that the most we’ve spent since WWII, but it’s also more than the rest of the world is spending on defense combined. All this, as Defense Spending critic and analyst William Hartung points out, to combat “a dispersed terrorist network measured in the tens of thousands, not a nuclear-armed Soviet Union whose armed forces were measured in the millions.”

Worse yet, despite all the talk of “change” amongst the presidential candidates, defense spending will most likely continue to rise no matter who gets elected in 2008. According to Hartung:

Barack Obama has said we will probably need to “bump up” the military budget in a new administration, and both he and Hillary Clinton have committed themselves to increasing the size of the armed forces by tens of thousands of troops. On the Republican side of the aisle, John McCain and Mike Huckabee are looking to spend even more than their Democratic counterparts.

Is this the sort of change that’s exciting so many Americans? More US military spending means more war, means more dead innocent civilians, means more hatred, means retaliation, means the justification for more US military spending, means growing debt and the further depletion of funding for programs of real merit: health care, education, protecting the environment, etc.

Voting for change is not going to stop this cycle. As Gandhi said, “We must be the change, we wish to see.” The best place to begin is by acting nonviolently in your daily life. That means forgiving when you are insulted, loving when you are spurned, and speaking the truth about violence whenever someone attempts to support it. Do this and you will have done far more for change than by casting a ballot.