I really can't believe some of what I've been reading here today.

[TheMightyFavog]

All these posts calling for President Obama to militarily intervene in Ukraine. Hell, I've even seen a couple of DUers go out and call on Obama to do the unthinkable and put the use of WMDs on the table.

What the hell happened to the DU I knew and loved when I joined back in 2002? Back then, DU was the beacon of sanity among the cacophony of war drums being beaten for Iraq. It was DU that inspired me to get involved in trying to steer my country away from the disaster that was the war in Iraq. It was stories of the activism of my fellow DUers that inspired a few friends and I to pile into my beat up 1992 Ford Tempo and drive an hour and a half to the nearest antiwar demonstration. It was DU that gave me the courage to go along with my friend's idea to gather in front of our county's courthouse to make our voices heard in a community where the majority of residents not only practically worshiped the ground that George W. Bush walked on, but also were practically chomping at the bit to see Saddam Hussein get a dose of candy coated kaboom courtesy of the good old U.S. of A.. Hell, some of the more ignorant of these people would have liked nothing better than to see Bush turn Baghdad into a glass parking lot.

However, march we did. We were a small group, but we made our opinions known. We spent hours in the cold waving our signs, singing songs, and trying to make our voices heard.

And yes, we got heckled. We got flipped off. We had people write nasty letters to the editor in our local newspapers calling us everything from communists to Satanists to traitors who hated America. And among all that hate that was being slung at us, DU was my refuge of sanity. It was where I could go to be around like minded people, and to know that I was not alone. That there were others like me who felt that military action against Iraq was a very bad idea. It was a place where we could deride and even poke fun at on the Bush administration and its supporters without fear of someone getting all in our face about how unamerican we were. And it's one of the reasons I still continue to treasure this place.

And now, we come to today. And now I'm hearing the very residents of the place that was (and still is) my refuge of sanity banging the war drums themselves. Wow, it's kind of darkly ironic.

That's all I have to say, except for may cooler heads prevail, and may this scary time pass with the fewest lives lost.