Happiness is waiting - in Central America

It's been a while since I posted anything - a little bit of vacation and a lot of thrown-out back have gotten in the way for a few weeks. I'm sure that everyone has gotten by relatively well during my absence!

I've got a lot of ideas that I'm hoping to blog about soon, but for now, I'll just point you to an Op Ed in yesterday's New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. It seems that, by many measures, Costa Rica is the happiest place on earth. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why that is, but Kristof points out that we can guess that part of it might be because they disbanded their army and used that money to heavily fund education, instead.

Obviously, America isn't in a position to shut down our military, but remember that old bumper sticker which asked, "what if school had all the money they needed, and the army had to hold bake sales to buy weapons?" Well, it's worth thinking about how much good could be gained if we took a tiny percentage of the money we're spending on military stuff, and instead used it to support our school. As Kristof says:

I'm not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

Well. Yeah.

Shabbat Shalom!