Okay, America. Forget about the 1700 plus dead soldiers in Iraq. Forget about the 13,000 plus wounded soldiers wounded in Iraq. Forget about all the facts and figures of fighting in Afghanistan altogether. Freedom isn't free, right? Right. You can't put a price on freedom, right? Wrong. That's one thing we can keep track of rather easily. Let's do a little Jungle math. The war in Iraq has cost The United States 208 billion dollars thus far, and the number is rising daily. There are 275 million people in America, give or take. Here's the tricky part, so grab a calculator if you must. I don't care if you cheat as long as you get the correct answer. Divide the number of dollars by the number of Americans. That's 208,000,000,000 divided by 275,000,000. If you cancel out the zeros, it's 208,000 divided by 275. The answer is 756. Check your work. That's $756 per American for the War in Iraq.

Let's round that down to $750 just to give the government a few million bucks in lee way. No need to get picky. After all, there are people who would happily pay $1,000 or even $10,000 for the war. Of course, there are also people who wouldn't pay one cent to contribute to killing another human being. Let's just stay away from that debate, and stick to the fact that every American citizen represents $750 for the war effort.

That's EVERY American citizen. Not just the folks in your gated suburban community, not just your good friends, not just Republicans, not just registers voters, not just adults, not just rich people, not just soldiers. It's EVERY man, woman and child in this country. EVERY single person represents $750 dedicated to our preemptive war, liberation, regime change, fledgling democratic process, or whatever you want to call what we're doing on the other side of the world in a country most of us have never seen up close.

That family of four driving down the road: $3,000 worth of bullets (not gas). A classroom of 29 students and an underpaid school teacher: $22,500 of army boots (not classroom materials). 25,000 fans at a major league baseball game singing "God Bless America" instead of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game": $18,750,000 worth of Humvees (not community improvement projects). The price of a two and half year war which has no end in sight: $208 billion (not priceless).

If there's one thing I've noticed as the war goes on, it's that people don't want to think about it. They don't want to think about how or why we got into this conflict. To refresh your memory, President Bush pulled out weapons inspectors who could not find any Weapons of Mass Destruction and relied on faulty intelligence information instead. Saddam Hussein was the most dangerous man in the world, and in the name of protecting our Homeland Security we must move 150,000 soldiers (or $112.5 million worth of war) to the most volatile region on Earth. No WMDs were found, the world's most dangerous man was captured but violence still reigns, and this war is far from resolution. Yeah, let's not talk about it. It'll just make us feel bad.

What have we gotten for our $208 billion collectively or $750 apiece: a country in ruins, thousands of Arabs and American slain, terrorists running rampant, suicide bombers blowing up something every day, no exit strategy, no cheap oil, just occupation. Freedom is on the march? I'd rather have seen a special matinee showing of Apocalypse Now on the government's dime and called it a war.

We used to fight for our own freedom. The Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, The Civil War, World War I & II. For the last fifty years, we have rationalized our aggression with phrases like "The Domino Effect," "This aggression will not stand against Kuwait," and "Bring It On." We our not satisfied with having our own freedom. We must fight, kill, and die for the attempt of making the world think and act like us. Colonialism is alive and well on Earth.

Maybe we need to start looking at this war like a financial investment. Maybe people will start to understand how bad this situation is that we started. $208 billion and nothing but death, destruction and a puppet government to show for it. Start looking at everyone you see as $750 worth of war. EVERY person stuck in traffic, EVERY homeless person passed out on the ground, EVERY person eating in a restaurant, EVERY child born, EVERY college graduate, EVERY criminal, EVERY Christian, EVERY celebrity, YOU, ME! Seven-hundred-fucking-fifty!

No one is exempt. No one can take the moral high ground. No American can wash their hands of the blood and money. It's a representative democracy we live in, and the actions of our government represent all of us. Right now, we're all worth $750 worth of war, and the price we pay gets a little bigger every day.

Chris Jungle is worth a penny for his thoughts.