Sherwood Ross, writing for Counterpunch, notes the disconnect between America's reaction to the sniper murders at Virginia Tech and the daily carnage of death in Iraq. He asks some very important questions. To heal, one must have the courage to look directly into the mirror, even if it is the Medussa face one sees. This applies both to individuals and to nations.
At the memorial ceremony for those slain at Virginia Tech, President Bush said today he did not know what the victims had done to deserve their fate. How this nation wept as one when thirty innocent Americans perished and twenty more were wounded! There is almost nothing else on the television news but this tragedy --- not even news from the ongoing slaughter from the war in Iraq.
(MG) This has been a recurrent theme emerging from my blogging. From the MSM, we are informed of what to think about. The news cycle will be dominated for a week (or more) by this story. "If it bleeds, it leads" (unless some cute teenaged white chick belonging to a fundamentalist church goes to Aruba and goes missing ... Aruba alert .. missing white chick) (or unless another overly buxom grade C lush former playmate dies without telling anyone who the father is, provided she was formerly married to a much older billionaire).
Here we have the sorry spectacle of the man in the White House who made the war on Iraq, where a disaster comparable to the Virginia Tech massacre occurs four or five times a day every day, leading the nation in prayer! Yet when does this man go on television to ask the American people to pray for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been murdered in the illegal war he launched? And just as the students and teachers who perished at the hands of a crazed killer on the Virginia Tech campus had done nothing to deserve their fate, neither have the people of Iraq committed any crime to endure the unendurable they are suffering at the hands of a president who professed to be "horrified" at the events on a peaceful campus. If a South Korean student is regarded as a berserk killer for murdering thirty people what is President Bush, whose invasion to control oil-rich Iraq has cost nearly three quarters of a million lives, created four million refugees, and plunged the Middle East into turmoil?
The American people, including the families of the murdered Virginia Tech innocents, have collective blood-guilt on their hands. ... Are we, as a nation, too obtuse to grasp the connection between our "gun culture" policy at home and our militarist policy abroad that murders and mutilates human beings at every turn? Practically any one in America can buy a gun, and abroad, any dictator in the world can buy weapons made in America because we just happen to be the world's biggest arms peddler.
What kind of a society has America become? Why do we have two-million men in our prisons? Why, in some cities, is every second or third male either in prison or out on parole? Why is the murder rate soaring in so many cities? Why is there on average more than one killing a day in a city like Philadelphia? Why are our own terrorists murdering 30,000 Americans each year and injuring tens of thousands more with rapid-fire handguns of the sort used on the Virginia Tech campus? Do we realize, speaking of terrorists, that ten times as many Americans are being killed by Americans each year as all our troops in Iraq? Osama bin Laden is everywhere in America. He has a thousand faces. They are the faces of our own dispossessed, our own poverty-stricken, our own unemployed, our own underclass, our own idolized gangsters , our own youth who grew up in front of television sets that ooze violence and blood.
(MG) Those living the "American Dream", say in the top 20%, have it good, have it real good. So many of those living the "American Dream" in the lower 20% have it better than 90% of the peoples of the world. And to be a poor person in the USA, or at least in Chicago, it is possible to enjoy freedom (provided your clothes aren't dirty, and your poverty does not show) and to survive. I've been there. I've been a petty thief and a scavenger. You cannot believe the stuff that people toss out, drop, misplace or forget about. I've found $20 bills on the ground, a 6-pack of beer, full packs of cigarettes, clean clothes (Steve, the Polish Prince, whom I met one afternoon at a park on Austin Avenue, walking his dog taught me how to survive in Chicago without having to steal) food, perfectly good food.
(MG) And when one goes to the places where the ragged people go, one finds kindred spirits, who will share, of their food, of their vices, who will put you up for a night, a weekend. Who will help you find work for a day, at a place where you get paid in cash. Cigarette money, beer money, coffee, dinner and breakfast, transportation. Sure, you'll blow the money in a couple of days, maybe even in 24 hours. But you'll blow it sharing the booty, with kindred spirits, with the other ragged people -- the other drunks, druggies, and "loonies".
(MG) Or you can get yourself checked into an alcohol rehab facility. I went through a 28 day program at one in Glendale Heights. Went in with a BAL of 0.00. Part of my "therapy" program under my alcohol counselor, Ginger Jordan. At one time, Ginger was a nun. She ended up marrying one of her professors, leaving the habit behind. I frustrated her. She didn't know what to do with me. WELL, I was clinically depressed, severely depressed. Didn't have enough energy to even lift a beer. So, she sent me to alcohol rehab.
(MG) What a trip. Met Kevin, a laborer, US Marine Viet Nam war vet, former heroin addict and heroin dealer. It was his fifty-seventh stay at the alcohol rehab place. He related to us the conversation he had with his counselor. "So, we look at my reocrds. Kev - this is your fifty-seventh admission. You really have to think about your ANGER ISSUES."
(MG) "ANGER ISSUES," he damn near fell off his chair, alternating between laughter, and anger. "ANGER ISSUES? Hell, it's winter. I'm cold. I'm hungry. I got not job. WTF do you think I'm going to do to survive? With my criminal record, I get my *ss in trouble, I'm going to jail. I already did three years time. I'm not going back to jail."
(MG) These were scammers and schemers, saints and dreamers. And our number is legion. Wake up America, we're here, there and everywhere. You just have to open your eyes.
Who is responsible for the killings in Iraq except the same now bereaved parents of the murdered students at Virginia Tech? It's not that some of them voted to elect George Bush. Anyone can be deceived, particularly by a notorious liar. But when the president broke the law and invaded Iraq, violating the UN Charter, how many of them protested? Today they are upset that a young, crazed gunman has ran amok on the campus of a peaceful university, but where were they when President Bush defied the United Nations and ran amok in Iraq? Do they know, as Amnesty International reported on the same day as the Virginia Tech murders, the Middle East "is on the verge of a massive humanitarian crisis" because three-million Iraqis have been "forcibly displaced" by the war the grief-stricken Mr. Bush began? Who do the American people think made this humanitarian crisis in the Middle East if not the American people?
(MG) It is the same willful blindness for which the German people were indicted. Does one wonder aloud where their Jewish neighbors went? Does one pause to think about the smoke from the ovens? Or does one go on about one's business, working diligently, trusting in one's leaders, living a life of comfort? There's a choice, always a choice. Which do you choose: to see reality, or to comfort yourself saying, "I was only doing my duty."
The same parents who weep for their children might consider that they and their neighbors are also spending a half trillion dollars a year so that the Pentagon, just over the horizon from Virginia Tech, can wage a war that is snuffing out the lives of children of other parents just like their own. Thousands of Virginians work for the military-industrial complex. They work for the Pentagon. They work for defense contractors. They work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are in the business of killing directly or indirectly, yet how many of them are haunted by the consequences of their "jobs" in their dreams at night?
All across America, people who attend church and regard themselves as "good" people, such as the bereaved at Virginia Tech, are working in the plants that make atomic bombs and warplanes and napalm and cluster bombs and are creating new, demonical designs of germ warfare and space-based weapons so vile and horrible they defy description.
America as a nation has become an organized nightmare. Yesterday, the nation woke up to the pain of the kind of killing it has been inflicting widely around the world since its fleets of bombers roared out to destroy Dresden, since it leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since it laid waste to Vietnam, since it overthrew Chile, and now since it has invaded two Middle Eastern nations in its thirst for oil. Yes, weep for the innocent victims of Virginia Tech, who only wanted to study and live in peace. But weep also, America, for the people of Iraq! If President Bush cared as much for them as he cares for his own, he would have to hold four news conferences a day. He would never stop grieving.
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