I know that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. I am thankful to all the soldiers and servicemen and women who are over there so I don't have to be, and who are protecting my right to think they have no business being there. I just wanted to say those things first, since disagreeing with this war seems to make other people think that you are either a fan of Saddam Hussein's, or don't support our troops, or both. The human mind is generally more complex than binary code, and does not work in THIS or THAT mode, but allows for a whole spectrum of feelings. Unless of course you are President Bush and you only think in THIS or THAT mode. How could he possibly have graduated from Yale, let alone your local community college?
Last weekend I thought about getting, or making, some kind of No War button to wear, something with that circle with the line through it across the word War. And then I remembered that I had a button, the one in the picture. I've had it since about 1970, and I knew just where it was, too. Every car I've driven as an adult, I've had this peace button clipped to the visor, or onto the ceiling of the car just next to the visor. Kind of like a permanent reminder.
I don't see how this war is all that different from Vietnam, and didn't we learn that lesson? That it was a bad idea, a bad thing, bad, bad, no matter how you looked at it? We didn't liberate anyone from anything. We supported a corrupt regime. We allowed hundreds of thousands of our own children to die in that lost cause, not to mention all of the others who died, too. These were our own sons and brothers. How could any government allow that to happen, encourage it, make it happen?
I am watching all this television coverage with an incredible amount of discomfort. We all got to see how terrible Vietnam was when Walter Cronkite started showing it to us every night with dinner. I remember the impact of an article in Life magazine: it showed all the faces, like in a high school yearbook, of all the Americans killed in Vietnam in a single week. It was horrifying beyond words. But now, as soon as one of our soldiers is killed, we cut immediately to an interview with his family! An interview with his family! When there is a wreck on the highway, do we rush right up to the survivors and ask how they feel about losing a loved one? They feel f--ing awful! No question! Leave these people alone!
And then there are the embedded reporters. Sunday morning I saw one lying on the ground next to a few Marines, explaining what was going on (don't they get CNN in Baghdad, too?) and then he actually crawled right up next to a young Marine, rifle aimed at the enemy, and interviewed him! Come on!
We are so arrogant, we Americans. Somehow we expect to conquer the infidel and be home for breakfast. We sound so much like the Southern plantation owners in Gone With the Wind, anxiously waiting for the Civil War to start. "Gentlemen fight better than rabble," they said. "We'll whip those Yankees in six weeks." Hey, both sides in any war call on God to bless them, so how does that work? Does anybody really believe that God takes sides, chooses some of his children to die so others can triumph over them? If I believed in that sort of God concept, I would not want to believe in a God that made such choices.
If there is God, and he loves us, then he's got to love all of us, case closed. I'll allow for Mother Teresa to get some sort of special treatment from him, but no one else. He's got to love all of us the same. All of us living have to have the same relative value, or what's the point? And if we do, then we've got to realize that it's just as wrong to kill people in Iraq as it was for the terrorists to bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We know how horrible, how painful that was for us as a society, and certainly for those individuals directly involved. It will feel just as horrible to an Iraqi to lose a child, a father, a brother. They will feel the same pain. How can we want anyone else to feel that pain?
If I had an answer I could be the president, but I don't so I'm not. But here's what I think they should have done, after the Gulf War or even before. Someone should have found some way to get Iraq to be our friend, or better yet, our economic dependent. There must have been some product -- maybe Coke -- that we could have sent them for free for a year or two under the guise of humanitarian aid and then they would need it, and us, and they would be sucking up to us now instead of what's going on. If we said "Get rid of Saddam" they would have had to, or the entire economy of the country would have collapsed. Maybe ball bearings. Do industries still need ball bearings?
Why does everything always have to be adversarial and confrontational? Why does it always have to end with people dying? People are going to die anyway; do we need to have a hand in hurrying it along? We needed to find some way to tickle them into submission. But no, instead we elected Sheriff George W. Cowboy -- "be out of town in 48 hours" -- Bush ... no wait, we didn't ...
So my war rant comes to an end. It is wrong and bad to kill people. This is not conditional. This is truth. Peace.
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I'm watching Hubs has remote: an old movie
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