I think I was 16.
So, he was up there?
Being shot at?
That was the beginning for me. That was when I looked around the ‘family room’ and realized that there was blood on everything. I felt sick. I knew that the nation was sick.
The social turmoil, the assassinations and riots, not to mention the personal dislocation that years of war had brought to our household — and would continue to bring like a slow curse — kind of snapped into perspective.
And here we are, again. 2007.
The idea that we have, again, destroyed another country, wiping out a whole city with napalm and phosphorous, murdered hundreds of thousands of people…
No, I can’t start listing the familiar charges or I will be sick with my own hypocrisy. A listing of particulars that is only a litany. A litany of crimes in which we are all complicit by the fact of our citizenship. A litany that doesn’t express real guilt, and so offers no absolution. Our desperate repetition of the crimes become only an exercise in stress management.
And, now, you see, I really want to start laughing.
What do they call that, inappropriate affect?
Because ‘they’ (WE) are going to do it AGAIN, very soon, to yet ANOTHER nation!
And I sit here at this computer. My lifeline to other caring citizens…But I am so tired of watching this, decade after decade, now.
Arthur [Silber] keeps pointing out that this has been going on for a century…
May those good souls present and those powers unseen that disdain the cruelty borne of man’s ignorance enlighten the hearts of enough of us, and soon, to end this blasphemy, once and for all. Amen.
…. But when you are reduced to prayer, in the comments section of a political blog… man, you know you’re fucked.