Abandoned homefront
Nearly a week later, and I still can't get the paltriness of the figure out of my head. Kids are dying on the streets of Dorchester, elders are held hostage in their homes by fear, out-of-town visitors are shot in the head, MBTA passengers are ducking gunfire. And Deval Patrick offers an extra $900,000 to improve public safety in the city of Boston.
Don't retiring officials over at Massport get something like that in unused sick pay? Wasn't that the cost of a day's overrun on the Big Dig?
I took a walk through Roxbury and Dorchester the other night with Mayor Thomas M. Menino, trying to get him to share my outrage, which he wouldn't do. For him, it's about the reality of too little money at a time of too many problems. For me, it's a matter of priorities, and I couldn't help but wonder, where have ours gone?
And then it occurred to me: Abroad. The United States has spent $415 billion and counting on a war in Iraq that had no clear reason to start and has no discernible way to end. Now the president is throwing one of his famous fits because the Congress hasn't rubberstamped his demand for another $100 billion in war spending.
And for what purpose is our involvement being drawn out? To bring order to Iraq and safety to the people who live there. But when exactly did Baghdad become more important than Boston?
There's a website called Costofwar.com run by the National Priorities Project, an organization that tracks public spending and provides a running odometer of US war spending in Iraq.
The site allows viewers to break down the cost, to show that of the $415 billion spent by yesterday, $11.7 billion of the Iraq funding came from Massachusetts. Of that, $855 million came from Boston alone.
Think about this for a moment. There's bloodshed on the streets of our capital city, good people, everyday people, living in fear. We've sent $855 million off to Iraq from Boston in the last four years. And what we get from the state government in our moment of desperation is $900,000, and the federal government is nowhere to be found.
Need more perspective? The new head of
Suppose Boston got to keep just one-tenth of the money it sent off to Iraq. Ten percent of $855 million is $85.5 million, give or take a few rubles. What might we have done with that?
We were driving through Roxbury in his sport utility vehicle when I asked Menino that exact question the other night. "We could do a lot of things," he said solemnly. "Extended school hours, poverty programs, workforce development programs, all these things. There's so much you could do. And we wouldn't have to go begging."
For that amount of money, the city could fund an additional 170 police officers, salary and benefits, for the next five years. Or it could fund 100 additional officers and have $45 million to hire outreach workers, build the Rev. Gene Rivers his boxing gym, put thousands more kids in summer jobs.
Menino, by the way, has been smacked around by pundits and a few city councilors lately, amid whispers that he has grown out of touch. If that is true, someone forgot to tell the people in the affected neighborhoods. He got two standing ovations at the Jubilee Christian Church in Mattapan on Friday night. Women poured out of a nail salon in Grove Hall to shake his hand. Everyday people thanked him on the street.
His problem is that people in the upper reaches of government don't particularly care what happens in places like Roxbury and Mattapan.
US money pours into Baghdad, and the residents of Boston, in their moment of need, get a couple of scraps. It's all a matter of priorities, and cities, at least our cities, aren't really one of them.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com. 
