Posts under ‘war’

Is the United States of America is the world’s largest dealer of illegal drugs?  What about the world’s largest gun runner?  For years our government has used the CIA, NSA & other super-secret ‘intelligence’ agencies to cultivate drug harvest and distribution in SE Asia and Afghanistan.  We offer ‘aid’ and ‘trade’ to countries in the forms of weapons and ammunition.  The drugs come home to the US to poison and kill our own population.  The weapons we sell are used either against us directly by people to kill others, who then seek to kill Americans.  Did the founding fathers envision a country that would become the world’s largest debtor and blood merchant?

(Image courtesy of indiesocial.com)

I walked onto the train platform in downtown Chicago today.  A woman had just finished shopping at Macy’s and had several red shopping bags.  She was trying to put everything into one bag.  The wind picked up and blew some of the empty bags down the platform.  I took off running and stopped them from blowing out onto the street. 

Then, she yells to me that: "It’s OK!  They’re empty."  Then she sits down and waits for the train with her two bags full of stuff.  The 5 empty big red bags are just out there on the platform and she makes no effort to pick them up.  I told her that I didn’t want litter for a Christmas present, picked them all up and threw them in the trash (no recycling on CTA platforms…dammit!).

Image courtesy of cesr.org

This post begins a series to recognize people that speak about the world in terms of what they observe and what they can prove.  Their voices stand out in the crowd.  In their words, they speak not of fantasy, delusion and rationalization.  Instead, they utilize the gifts of human cognition, awareness to observe what is here in the world around us.  They are not dogmatic, but analytic and take in the world ‘warts & all’ for what it is and what it is not.  They do not separate humankind from nature in any form of grandeur.  In short, they look at things the way they really are and not what we would have them be.

I condemn murder in all of its forms. This is a conversation about terrorists and attacks on civilian populations.

Last week’s brutal attacks of unarmed civilians in Mumbai got me to thinking about the nature of attacks on civilians. For many years, I accepted the given definition of ‘terrorists’ as people that are so filled with evil that they want to frighten and kill us all. There are always sociopaths out there to fit into this mold. I think that for the sheer numbers of civilians killed in targeted violence, sociopaths are not the only explanation. The large role of religious / dogmatic programming in targeted violence against civilians eliminates sociopathology as a cause because the sociopath has no conscience or care for his/her impact on society. For the most part, the religious killer is convinced that his/her morality is calling for the murder of civilians.

“The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession,” and its days are numbered.” (H. G. Wells, as quoted in the Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers.)

The enemies of democracy are the enemies of the rule of law.

“enemies both foreign & domestic…”

Our Presidents and our armed forces swear to protect the Constitution from this threat – with good reason. The Constitution is the rule of law and it is the one thing that can prevent tyrants, thieves and murderers from the ruinous world of their unchecked greed and brutality.

Yesterday, I wrote about my grandfathers and their contribution during WW2. As I finished it, I realized that it was incomplete - only half of the story. It is all too common that I think of only the soldiers from WW2 first and the families that stayed behind second. Sadly, the legacy of the children and wives of the soldiers consists of far greater numbers than all of the troops that left to fight. The people who stayed behind. They were mothers, fathers, younger brothers and sisters, children and wives.

My two grandmothers stayed behind with their children. The war was not kind or easy for them. For some, their sacrifices continue to this day.