Cindy Sheehan: Cure the Disease

[Raster]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0613-21.htm

Published on Tuesday, June 13, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Oftentimes when I am interviewed before a speaking engagement, the reporter will ask me about what I am going to talk about. I often answer: "I have no idea, but I am excited to find out!"

I never write speeches and I rarely even make notes. I just speak from my heart and many times, I am even surprised by what I say.

Recently, I was speaking to a very large, warm, and enthusiastic crowd in Cincinnati. My thinking has been evolving about what I call BushCo. I started out believing that George was just a puppet (although willing) of a much larger machine that used him as badly as he was using his troops in his role as commander in chief. I still believe that.

Yet, although George is the not so clever, greedy, power hungry string-puppet of many clever, greedy, power hungry puppeteers, he is not the problem: he is just the symptom of a much greater problem: the corruptness of our democracy.

<snip, more>

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0613-21.htm

[IndyOp]

1. Cindy Gets It! Cindy quotes Smedley Butler!

I was conveying this thinking to the audience at my talk in Cincy when I said, "George Bush is ONLY a boil on the ass of democracy." He is not, no matter what the world thinks, the ass and, similarly, he is not, no matter what he thinks, the democracy. No doubt about it, he is a boil that needs to be lanced (impeached and removed from office) to cure immediate problems; such as crimes against humanity, but lancing him is only temporary relief. We have to look at why our democracy was so ill that it manifested itself in the symptom of George Bush. A symptom is also a warning sign and a wake up call. Let's examine the disease before we break out in more boils… which could be even more severe and poisonous than George.

One of the deep seated diseases in the USA is the false sense of patriotism that we are infected with from the time we are toddlers that allows our leaders to mislead us into war after war. Between the first and second world wars, Marine Major General Smedley Butler wrote the seminal work: War is a Racket. Up until that time, he was the most highly decorated Marine in history. He wrote in the first two paragraphs of his booklet:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

<snip>

These occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing but sickly rackets with the war machine getting wealthy off of our children's flesh and blood and off of the ruination of two countries and the deaths of many, many civilians. One was to cure the disease of losing our children in war that infects the mere citizens of America while the war profiteers bank accounts are glowing with health is to quit giving the military industrial complex our children like fatted calves to be sacrificed for their own bottom lines. We must know deep in our hearts and teach our children that our military only exists to keep the world safe for our corporations and that our military should only be used, as Gen. Butler said, to defend our country.

Emphasis MINE...

:woohoo: :applause: :bounce: :woohoo: :applause: :bounce:

[neoblues]

2. For the Puppeteers...

Look to the uber-wealthy who control the corporate machinery (and our government, by extension).

Reminded me of this recent post, be sure to check it out!
...
"Mercifully enough, the same predatory American capitalism that generates so much of the world’s misery renders its own citizens irrelevant save for their purchasing power, to the entire process and therefore guiltless -- in their own minds at least -- of the empire’s crimes."...