From over a year ago - Being right doesn't make me feel better

[Dems2002]

Citizen’s Cry


My country is planning to drop 3,000 bombs on a primarily defenseless nation with little hope of killing the man it calls the "evil one." I have protested, I have screamed, I have written diatribes to various news outlets, I have called my congresswoman, my senators and the local dog-catcher. I talk to myself and others about the evilness of this plan in public places in the hopes that strangers will overhear and realize either that they are not alone or that not everyone follows blindly. And yet as this march to war is declared inevitable I realize that this hasn't been enough.

History does not look kindly on seemingly good people who do nothing. I wonder if I and my fellow Americans are going to someday be compared to German citizens who watched and disbelieved as concentration camps were erected in backyards. To citizens who disagreed, but only to a point; a point that invariably began and ended with saving personal skins. Had these people but known what was to come certainly they would have done more. Mightn't I?

Maybe I'm making too much of this talk of thousands of bombs. The Democratic leaders in Congress don't seem overly concerned. The news media appear veritable cheerleaders. Surely, if something truly unjust and horrible were about to be done in our name these protectors of the public-good wouldn't tacitly condone it with silence and propaganda. Of course they wouldn't. Would they?

But what else can I do? I am just one person. What can one person standing alone accomplish? Gandhi who? I have to work, my family has to eat. Life goes on, you know?

I'm probably just trippin’ anyway. What do I really know about geo-political affairs? This is the United States of America. We don't bomb countries without good reasons. Just because no one seems to know what that reason is and the entire world is against us, doesn't mean that we aren't right. Right?

I don't think we're right. I think history is going to look at us and judge. I don't expect it to be kind. Maybe, just maybe, there's still time.

[Robbien]

1. I remember that despair and helplessness

and the sense of impeding doom knowing what we were doing was wrong. It was a gut wrenching time. You expressed it so well.

[vajraroshana]

2. It doesn't make me feel right either

although I told my friends as much that it was going to happen anyway. I live in N. Alabama and heard the bomb-testing going off almost non-stop (I bet you can guess which N. Alabama city I'm from) during the lead-up to the "war".

We protested, we wrote. That doesn't even matter to this administration.

I feel your frustration.

It's infuriating. There's been enough information available to mobilize everyone to countenance this ridiculously illegal "war".

I feel much the same as you do. So much impotence. Especially when even my brother, a reservist, says such unbelievably ignorant things like "they bombed us" -- he was referring to 9/11. "They?" I ask, but it falls on deaf ears. He's one of the multitude hypnotized by the "patriotic" drumbeat.

It's disheartening, but all is not yet lost.

The polls are slipping. And f*** those who will tell us we're undermining our troops. We want them home! Now!!!!!!

I've got family members that have been (or may still be, we're not told) in Afghanistan. It would be no comfort to know that they've been shifted to Iraq. We really don't know where some of our family members are -- they're just poor "grunts" in the service.

F*** this imbecile's war. Bring them home now.

November!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[izzie]

3. Well we did have Dem that were for the war and war means blow up

people and things. Frankly you must feel like you are banging your head on the wall, as I feel. I guess we need to take to the streets. That will not get to Bush in his bubble. If we yell enough maybe the congressmen running in Nov. will hear.

[vajraroshana]

4. I'm frustrated

We did go to the streets. The biggest protests in history.

I am 100% anti-violence, so I don't know what we can do. Protests (again, I say, the biggest in history) didn't work.

What is it going to take?

[izzie]

5. I guess we need more people on the street and more counting votes.

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