Today marks three years of war. It seemed appropriate and compassionate to stand on the busy street corner with others who wanted to remember those who died in this war. Wearing black, standing alone and silent, felt benevolent, at least for much of the three-hour tribute.
I appreciated the clothesline of empty tee shirts, one for each of the 2000+ Americans who have died in this war, because it made me think of the individuals. However, the big picture slammed me where it hurts a couple of times when I looked down both sides of the road, saw those empty shirts flapping in the wind, and imagined the crowd of strong, young bodies that should be filling them.
Sure tears and wind would play havoc with my eyes, I shied away from the big picture and adopted the five shirts in front of me. The red one was small, but well protected by the two on either side of him. Rabble-rousers flapped on either end of my group. I'm sure their spirits snickered each time they wrapped around the line and I walked over to untangle them.
My group remained anonymous; my daughter had a boy with freckles in hers. The pizza lover was farther down. Two fathers hung across the street, one who died before his first child was born, which made the pro-war protesters who came to call us baby-killers sound rather foolish.
I wish I could say they stopped at foolish, but there's no such luck with pro-war people. Lefty hippies left over from the sixties didn't bother me. It's true enough for me, but didn't impress me as the most intelligent name-calling when used on people who were obviously born after the sixties. Likewise, tree-huggers and liberal freaks didn't hurt.
The real discomfort started when an overweight, teen-aged skinhead asked the woman behind me when she had been in Iraq. Assuming he had a heart, she told him she hadn't been, but her son had died there. Skinhead told her to love it or leave it.
Another pro-war advocate dodged the line of police officers attempting to hold them under control, and came to my space. "This is world war IV," he said. I walked away to unwrap my rabble-rouser. He followed. "Those terrorists want to kill you." His tone said he did too.
My little red guy wasn't wrapped, but I thought he could use some attention anyway. I moved down and straightened his sleeves. Obnoxious, disrespectful Pro-War Daddy stepped closer, really crowding my space.
"My son's over there," he said.
With tears, I looked him in the eye and said, "I'm sorry."
He laughed as the police officer sent him back to his side. Later, he shouted at me again from his side. "Lefty cry-baby." His friends liked the new name so well they all shouted it a few times. He added, "Why don't you stop whining and support the troops."
My letter writing, phone calling, constant campaigning for decent equipment, uncontaminated water, benefits, VA hospitals, and bringing them home is how I support the troops every day. This man couldn't see that by standing on that corner, enduring his disrespect and ignorance in order to remember the lives lost, I was supporting the troops and their families today.
The least intelligent pro-war chant I heard today was, "You just want to support Iraqi abortion clinics." No, but I suppose the pro-war gang just wants to support killing everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Iran, according to their signs today), including pregnant women. Do they even think?
I'm not as strong as I want to be. By the time I left that corner, I wanted to hurt someone. My choice would have been the man who stood in my space and breathed his hatred on my five shirts.
I also wanted to counter their 'God bless Iraqi Freedom' sign with a 'God Damn the Warmongers' sign of my own.
(we'll be in and out quickly, they'll welcome us with open arms)
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Comments: 89
Sally, I was almost grace under fire today (if thoughts don't count) only because of the reason we were there. On another day, I might make that man sorry he approached me. He passed men to get to me - interesting, huh?
And for those who want to know what I look like now - that's me in the bottom right corner of the picture, wearing the black coat and moving that sign off one of my rabble-rousers.
I am so proud of you. I believe that you are supporting our troops.. by trying to get them out of a sensless death. I do not understand the "love it or leave it" people.. I have went against this war since day one. I love america.. perhaps that is why I wish to make it better. I suppose their will always be followers.. they can line up to protect their government.. too bad the government would not pee on them if they were on fire. I prefer to step out of the flock and make up my own mind. Does that make us bad people? No, it does not.. Just people who challenge the wrongs.. If there were not people who did this.. i believe there would have been no United States.. we would still be under a kings rule.. You are a brave and wonderful woman.. my heart is there with you..
Ron, thanks for your comment and for the advice on unflagging. I've given it a lot of thought, and agree. This does not need to be flagged because there is no inappropriate language. God, it the literal sense, means supreme reality, or person or thing of supreme value. Damn means to condemn or denounce. I do believe supreme reality should denounce the ugliness I see in the pro-war group. And I will unflag this article.
Amy, I thought seriously about leaving several years ago but decided it wasn't fair to my grandchildren to not stay and give this as much fight as I could. I still keep a back-up plan.
It is a difficult but necessary duty to stand for peace. Thanks for bringing the human side to this.
Thanks, Cathy, if we'd all think about the humans involved (which is what the empty shirts really drove home for me) we might come to more humane decisions in this country.
Safi, if I'm sorry helps any, please know how very sorry I am. I didn't want either of these wars (it seems the one in Afthanistan keeps getting pushed under the rug). I heard about yet another film of torture coming out today. Haven't seen much on it yet, so I can't give any details. If I have anything to say about it, those who tortured, ordered torture, excused torture, and condone torture will be held accountable.
This is an incomplete list BTW.
http://icasualties.org/oif/Civ.aspx
This 'god' guy should have a time out chair...
John, my heart is with you and your daughter. I hope I never have to tend her shirt, but promise I will tend her best interests every day by begging for her to have the equimpment she needs to be as safe as possible, and the benefits she deserves while there and after she returns.
Beryl, I felt the hug. Thank you so much that, and also for understanding my anger.
History has spoken. The Bushies that be have chosen not to listen. And, most outrageous of all, they are trying to brainwash folks with the lie that supporting the war=patriotism=supporting the troops. Protest is the essence of democracy and exactly what our (protesting!) forefathers fought Britain for.
Thanks for this dispatch from the front line here in the States, Sandy.
The whole idea that dissention is the anitthesis of patriotism hurts... it hurts everyone, the dissentors, the supporters, the country. We seem all too willing to forfeit our rights lately. People are not nearly angry enough over the wiretapping issue; they are not nearly angry enough about the lies we have been told; we are not angry enough about our rights being railroaded.
The greatest lack of troop support, I believe, is shown by those who never question our erroding freedoms. If we willing let go of them here, in the United States, why are our men and women fighting to give this freedom to those overseas.
If we want to show support, we need to stand up for our rights at home - as you have done. For that, I am proud of you.
I saw a bumper sticker a while back that said "we are making enemies faster than we can kill them", and while initially I laughed, I suddenly realized the truth of that. We ARE making enemies faster than we can kill them!
Supporting the troops means writing them, and remembering them, and helping they and their families. Protesting against this war does not mean we don't support them. We DO NOT support the reason for their deaths and injuries, for we do not believe those deaths and injuries to be necessary.
Lastly, the skinheads are cowards. If they support this war so fully, let them sign up and join the military as I did, and let some of the decent folk come home.
i applaud your actions, thoughts and feelings. and i completely understand your desire to hurt someone after what you put up with. it is frustrating, hurtful and disheartening to butt heads with loudmouth ignoramuses. just know that there are millions of us behind and beside you.
Thanks, Erik. If we carry peace in our hearts and minds, it seems it would have to seep out into the world, huh? I'll have to do more of that to ward of the urge to hurt someone like I had on tee-shirt day.
Every day in a new and more virulent manner, their true nature is revealed. The hardest thing is that I think our natural reaction is to think "They can't possibly mean it - they can't be filled with so much hate"
They do mean it -- they are that hateful -- that is the proof, the color, and the nature of their faith. That is the core of their morality.
On the whole, however, I don't even blame this fiasco on just Bush and his gang. T me it all has just this deja vu all over again smell. Does it really matter if it was my people living near a silver mine or if there was gold in them thar hills or if it's oil in Iraq? Anglo-America wants it and if you're in the way, the enablers will come along and simply wipe you out, men, women, children, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the enablers are the US armed forces, the cavalry, or the buffalo soldiers, that greedy gang will always find a contingent of enablers and a callous citizenry that huirrahs them on because there's one thing that came in abundance over here on the Mayflower, and that was militarism and warmongering.
With this in mind, do I really worry about the US troops who died in Iraq so far? No, not really. There is an old US-American tradition: If you joined the Armed Forces as a officer and your outfit killed plenty of Indians, you had a sure vote getter for political office. Could you imagine Rudolf Hess running in German politics braying that he's a successfull Jew-killer? The whole world would be upset over this but it was okay for Andrew Jackson to run for office as an Indian-killer or the old Bush as a Jap-killer, even Kerry bragged about being a Vietnamese-killer. You see, when Americans do this, somehow their fellow Americans don't see the mentality behind it. Why not?
So when people from a country that traditionally elected Indian-killers into high office run over to Iraq to make a living murdering Iraqi children, I can't really get emotional over the fact that a bunch of them got wiped out doing this. After all, they're all volunteers. If it didn't occur to them beforehand that the Iraqi might just defend themselves against these American terrorists in uniform, then it's probably just as well that the Iraqi provided the chlorine to take them out of the gene pool.
Whatever our troops tell us they believed, by the time the war against the Iraqi people opened up with our USAF bombing homes in Baghdad relentlessly for several days, anybody with a brain in his head knew that our troops are targeting civilians, families, children over there. After all, if you don't target little children, why would you send the Air Force to bomb residential areas, communities anyway? And don't talk to me about smart-bombs because all bombs will fall on whatever they drop on and explode. Daisy-cutters are some of the most vicious bombs under the sun. Cluster bombs contain shrapnel and are basically illegal. White phospherous has the same effect as napalm and burns children alive. Its use against people is illegal. All the munitions our troops use are laced with radioactive depleted uranium. Iraq and Afghanistan are covered in radioactive dust which is already traveling in the atmosphere.
Am I expected to honor our troops for doing all this? I won't. They have their choice. They can commit these horrendous crimes against humanity in order to help the rich get richer or they can haul their butts home and stay where they belong. True, they might get punished for desertion but that's just too bad, they should have thought about that when they volunteered for the service. It's not the responsibility of the children in Iraq that these doofless bastards here in America can't find a better job. People are responsible for their own actions, and that applies to soldiers as well. When they run into a foreign country to murder the people there, they're murderers, end of story.
I agree with you on most of this. And having never been in the service myself, I will have to defer to your knowledge of something I only know second-hand. If most of those who have lost their lives were the grunt men (I know you don't like for me to think of them as boys, but at my age, they are still kids to me), and they volunteered before this administration moved in, I have sympathy for them. They were already there, brainswashed (as they must be in order to be safe), and believed the lies they were told about WMDs, and Iraq being a threat. I think most of those guys thought they were protecting this country, not invading. I've met several who came back thinking differently, but for me this explains why they didn't defect.
I'm going to hold off responding to the rest of this, hoping you'll post it as an article.
d
Hussein, like so many others, had his faults and his good sides as well. In my opinion, he was no better or worse than Clinton or anybody else in political office and a great deal better than Bush. Most of all, however, it's not America's place to install heads of state in other countries or to meddle in other countries period. Deborah there said that Hussein had to go, but what is it to her? Does she live in Iraq? If she lives in the US, why doesn't she worry about who's running this country?
Frankly, only the removal of the non-existing WMDs had any kind of legitimacy, it is simply not America's place to remove other heads of state. At any rate, quite obviously our military didn't run over there to remove Hussein from office. Obviously they ran over there to attack the people in Iraq, and that's exactly what they're doing.
About 50% of Iraq's population is under 15 years old. Half of the adults are women. All our military is doing in Iraq is fight a war against women and children. Our troops should be ashamed of themselves. Let's see, that general who was in charge of Abu Ghraib is in her 50s. Every American soldier over there is at least 18 years old but these reserves are really quite frequently in their 30s and 40s. All officers have a college degree, so they're anywhere between 23 and 50+ years old. And these people have nothing better to do with their time than to attack a country where 3/4 of the population are women and children, and the other 1/4 consists of males between 15 years and 100 years old, some of them invalids.
It's all good and well to make excuses for our troops and see them as "kids" although I have a hard time envisioning some 50 year old grandma as a kid, but keep in mind that while all our troops are in reality able-bodied adults, the population of Iraq consists of people of all ages and in all states of health. So it gets a bit difficult to empathize even with some 18 or 19 year old soldier when he's firing his rifle at a pregnant Iragi woman who has a couple of toddlers in tow. After all, regardless how young our troops are, they're definitely older than more than 1/2 of the population of Iraq they attacking. And yes, they're fighting civilians over there.
When I see more people speak out against the war, I feel stronger. Thanks, Sandy!
Are the people in Iraq better off now? Well, does radioactive contamination of their entire country count? Besides, did we really go over there with worries about how well off they are or will be? Our intent never was to render them better off but to steal their oil, correct? So now their country is bombed to rubble, 200,000 of their people are dead, millions are maimed and/or homeless, their children will always remember the horror we brought upon them, so are they better off? Does anybody really need to ask this question?
And why are we not leaving Iraq? Well, we have to remain there to steal their oil, remember? There wouldn't have been any point in attacking the people in Iraq if we don't get that oil.
This war was never about Hussein or the Iraqi people, it was about America, it was about us, it was about Bush and his cronies wanting to get richer. Just ask Bush why he attacked Iraq and he'll be as confused as always. He doesn't really know because it was Cheney and the old Bush who told him to attack the people there.
So, if you ask Bush why he attacked Iraq, one time he'll tell you that it was on account of 9/11 although 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq period. Then he'll tell you to install a democracy there but that's none of his business and besides, he might wanna try installing a democracy here first, yanno, have a trial run first. Or he'll tell you that he wanted to fight Al-Qaeda there rather than here without noticing that Al-Qaeda wasn't even in Iraq until our troops showed up there. Another time he'll tell you he attacked Iraq to fight terrorism but there weren't any terrorists in Iraq until the US showed up there. Or he'll tell you all about Osama Hussein and Saddam binLadin because he doesn't even have a clue, and in the end, I guess he attacked Iraq because it's easier to spell than Afghanistan.
But Bush ain't the only one who's confused, so is most of America I noticed. The US just committed the worst attrocity of the century against the Iraq people and I get to read in this forum all about the Wahabi. Excuse me but ain't Hussein Sunni? Aren't our good friends, the Saudi, Wahabi? So because we're afraid of the Wahabi, we attack the Sunni in Iraq and threaten the Shiites in Iran and the Buddhsts in Korea too for good measure? And we sit around and wonder why the world considers the US an insane asylum?
Incidentally, in case everybody here missed this, a terrorist bomb went off in Bolivia and an American with ties to the CIA has been arrested along with his girlfriend from Uruguay. The bomb was aimed at killing the new president of Bolivia and other government officials there.
Great comments, great questions. You always make me think, and I love that.
If you had your way there would be many more empty shirts in Iraq.
Shame on your immorality, ignorance and bigotry!
You have consistantly opposed any measure to remove Saddam from power and have done your utmost to portray the Sunni terrorists in a sympathetic light.
Your article here is implicit in its implication that the more Americans die in Iraq, the better your cause is served.
As for stalking, a practice you do it so well, why are you concerned that others do what you do?
So, in other words, when others do what you do -- it is stalking.
Opposing all practical means of doing something is opposing doing something. I am sure that you wholeheartedly supported replacing Saddam with another Socialist butcher who would funnel oil wealth to the left in Europe and the United States -- but that is not realistic now is it?
Destructive Forces in Political and Social Discourse
(First Post) P.S. I did read past this line -- Let us examine -- even though the condescending tone told me I'd hate the rest. - Sandy Knauer, Feb 21, 2006
(Second Post) I find it hilarious that Greg Schiller should post this piece. - - Sandy Knauer, Feb 21, 2006
The Quality of Compassion
I'm with Jade. It's easy to see through the holes in this article, and the bias isn't well hidden. Sandy Knauer, Mar 3, 2006
When Was "The Peace Movement" Ever About Peace?
As Joseph said, do some research. Sandy Knauer, Mar 19, 2006
Jaw drops... eyes get larger... lips mouth "HUH!???".
MY GOD Sandy, the trolling you and your little buddies have engaged in at Gather is nothing less than spectacular.
I am stunned at the hypocracy!!
A vist to the site would be very educational......it reveals the kind of ilk that Sandy defends.
Now Sandy...this is exactly why most people think the far left is such a shame. You only wanna preach to your own...
What we all have in common is that we are Americans. Some are more American than others. Most don't have a contingent plan to move to Canada like you do.
It is because of the more serious level headed Americans that have put their lives before some leftist doctrine that you and I even have the right to spout of our views. I am afraid that there was the same type of pacifist/anti-war protest before WW2, thank god for freedom that they were not taken seriously.
So keep on spouting, don't rapidly discount any opinion that isn't yours and keep enjoying the freedom that brave Americans have lost their lives for over the years.
Bryan...you are kidding...right?
I just checked. Hard as it is to imagine, Greg and I have a connection in common. I am also connected to someone else who responded to the article he linked above. That explains my part in showing up where he is at times... don't now how he constantly ends up on the same page I'm on, because he is not connected to the people I read most often.
yea mighty the meek
who know who they are
and know what they seek
for fair are the winds
that carry the dove
of the courage of truth
and the mercy of love
ignore the cold hearts Sandy
keep the empty shirts in mind
I am crying with you and for you
Thanks, Nancy and Lisa. I came here to respond to you and found an error after all this time. I removed that stray question mark. Think I'll drop it off at Steven Abbas' house, since he likes to triple up on punctuation.