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Free 50-Minute Phone Card + Free Shopping Spree! In what better way than it is now doing, can America tell the developing world that American lives and property are the only significant ones...that American losses are the only ones worth mourning, that America's need for revenge, for retaliation is the only one that counts, that's legal or morally justified.
I love what America represents, the United States Constitution especially and the days when this country was truly a beacon for Liberty and Freedom...even with the glaring contradiction of the murder and rape of the Native Population and Slavery and the subjugation of women.
But increasingly this country has become an aristocratic Elite that has forgotten from whence it came...has forgotten the noble sentiments which inspired its greatest leaders and thinkers. This country used to be the champion of the poor and downtrodden, it has now become a country that makes people poor and treads on them...from a country that stood alone almost against the greatest Empire of its day, to one which measures out its soldiers carefully lest they get hurt, and picks fights as a bully would against the weakest and most vulnerable...even as it has begun to do so against its own citizens.
This will not be the first great country, or Empire, which will be humbled by peasants and the poor. It has happened to far greater Empires, that the rot begins among its own citizenry who, due to the lazy arrogance of power and far too much leisure, considers itself to be far removed from the rabble below and rides over them unconcerned, heedless of the disasterous course it charts for itself...so caught up in the mometary glow of patriotism run rampant.
This is where America's increasing ignorance of anything except deals and bargains at Malls and pop culture minutiae will undo it utterly.
For all our sakes, some elements in this society had better wake up soon and make themselves heard. The Bush administration will make the most of this ridiculous "War" for short term gain, and they're whipping up support among the ignorant...forcing people who know better to keep quiet in fear...just as any one business that fails to display an American flag when all others on the block have fallen into step, will be viewed suspiciously...so is everyone being forced to march along, swept up in the euphoria of attacking the weakest people on earth, the most vulnerable while getting all the satisfaction they would if they were to defeat the most potent foe in the world. When, later, we come to our senses, we'll be reminded that the country all but forced a mandate on Bush, and he'll be clear, while we'll all pay the price for his instant elevation to Staesmanship" where he's the same puny idiot he always was...and this idiot has become a statesman now, so powerful were those explosions that they kicked him "upstairs", in our eyes at least.
As we have paid for ignoring the plight of the Jews for centuries, as we have ignored the plight of the Palestinians for generations of angry and frustrated youths mired in camps while across the road American largess and might have bought lands and homes for Israleis, as we have remained silent while Iraqi and Assyrian children have been starved and denied medicine till even the people working there have quit in disgust and frustration...even as America has continued turning up the heat on these people as if nothing would ever come from their careless wanton cruelty...even as all this has transpired America remained safe and above the fray.
That's why it is such a disgusting sight to see people so blind to the suffering of so many innocents, react with righteous wrath, contemplating horrendous retaliation against they care not who...while those they have hurt for generations never responded the same way.
Because that part of the world suffered in silence for so long, Americans feel that contrasting their own outrage at 5000 dead and three or four buildings lost, their calls for swift punishment etc...that the tolerance and patience of our own people there means that we admit our own losses don't count as much...WE even tell them that our people and their suffering is nothing compared to any American loss.
I am a citizen of the United States, but I live in an increasingly smaller world where there will be less and less protection from the wanton acts of violence and a desire for revenge which is obviously going beyond anything we would have imagined and anything we will be able to stop in the future...on that you can bet.
If you really are afraid for your own safety, for that of your children and their children, for your property and economic well being do not go along quietly with this mood for revenge. As the Americans themselves cautioned all sides only last week..."violence will only beget more violence". There are real things which can be done immediately to begin to bring justice and peace to each and every troubled corner of the world...better to work at that than to increase the potential for even more daring and desperate and destructive acts of retaliation and more retaliation.
The Gulf War solved nothing, the Iran/Iraq war solved nothing, the imposition of Israel has brought no peace or security to Israel, the refusal to accept the Jews in their ancestral homelands has brought only misery to the Palestinians and chaos to the Arab world...and in supporting each of these ventures for political gain or financial benefit, the United States has not only compromised its own noble tradition as a protector of the rights of the poor and downtrodden, but has placed its revered standing in the world in jeopardy and its citizens in the path of an onrushing disaster we cannot even imagine now...as we never would have imagined airplanes levelling two buildings.