I Heard The News...

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: My children give me the news from Afghanistan. I don’t read it myself. I’ve heard it all before. The United States is doing great, the missiles are marvelous, love that bomb, we are the Good guys no matter what, the Bad guys want to steal my home from me and on and on. Only to the young can this all be exciting and new news. To the rest of us it is depressingly familiar. Somewhere along the way America became a corporation and you’ve seen how much care American corporations show for their employees or the environment they live in. : Enjoy yourselves for the moment. You will pay a far greater price and soon too. I don’t wish it, I say those who don’t tell you the truth are the ones who bring it about, who have no desire for peace or justice or equity. They are after their profits and the fact that they’ll give you a twenty five cent or ten thousand dollar raise shouldn’t blind you to what it will cost you in the end, and how much more, how much obscenely more they profit than you ever will. And after you or your sons and daughters are dead, they’ll make that Trade agreement or win that contract this was all for anyway, as they’ve done after each necessary war, a war necessary to save YOU, the one these corporate giants sit up at night worrying over, the ones like you and your children they let out into the streets to beg and starve in the most wealthy nation ever on earth. : I have more in common with the fellahin of Egypt than I ever did with the boss of Ford Motor Company. Our incomes and ability to feed our families was always on about a par. Once, very briefly on the eve of World War One, the workers of the world tried to unite, tried to appeal to each others common interests and security, tried to resist the mad patriotism of their individual leaders who convinced them eventually that the War had to be fought for the sake of the little guy. That whore, Patriotism, got to working on each of them, made each of them love their own lakes and forests better than the next guys and convinced them that the carpenter in Germany wanted nothing more each morning when he awoke than to come destroy the forests that plumber of France, enjoyed on his one day off a year. : The real joke on everyone was that the war was more like a chess game than any before or since. It was a war fought among the crazy members of one nutty family, each using the poor slobs within their domains as cannon fodder. There was Victoria, Queen of England. Then there were her nephews and grandsons or inlaws, the Kaiser and Czar Nicholas and who knows how many relations married into or screwing the royal buns of other families. They were miffed and peeved that one was more or less noble than the other, owned less of Africa, stole more wealth to glorify themselves with…and all of them most Christian Majesties. : It happens with distressing regularity…this hating the other fellow business because he crosses himself with two fingers instead of three. It is such a backward way of thinking that we Assyrians find ourselves suddenly in the forefront of backwardness, which is where we belong so far. : : There isn’t any price almost that Assyrians wouldn’t pay to have me gone, to have me go out and make a name for myself out there, away from them. They wouldn’t care if I made it or broke my neck so long as I was gone and they could snore away their lives in the marketplace, waking every time they were kicked out of the way to go scratch their fleas and fall asleep at another spot, preferably where someone else could take care of them, protect them from their own simple stupidity. : Since I began all this twenty years ago people have been saying in different ways…go away, leave us alone. Some said it because they knew it could break my heart, others because they thought by taunting me I would do it, just to prove I was GOOD and WORTHY. They made it seem like a quest, a journey of discovery…did I have what it takes, the Right Stuff or was I only a sad little bum like they felt themselves to be all their lives, and never more so than when they yelled out about how proud to be Assyrian they were, only to hear a mocking echo in reply. : I wont go anywhere. Why should I prove anything to anyone else, or to any Assyrian or one who fancies himself to be one because it’s too awful to be an unnecessary Christian in a world dying of Christianity. I do what I want, stay where I want and those who don’t like it can learn to defend themselves better and earn their pride for a change instead of whining for it. : Come out Assyrians, come out come out wherever you are

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