NEWS FLASH! AS I WRITE: 9 More US Soldiers Dead in Iraq
For weeks, our airwaves have been full of governmental rhetoric about resolutions to end the war in Iraq. The Senate and Congress have debated, demanded, declared and postured, belting their opposing party positions over and over again on the IRAQ WAR. The media has followed their every move, sound-byted their every claim and brought in the pundits to argue their respective party points of view over and over again. The President too has contributed to the empty words as he has blustered out his threats and conviction to veto any resolution that requires accountability or results, helping us once again affirm that under his leadership, there is no openness for new ideas or earnest attempts for a course correction called for by the American people. While all this impotent talk has been going on, in just the last 28 days of April with no resolution in sight, 90 US and 11 UK military and a reported 1423 Iraqi security forces and civilians have died. Lives lost while our leaders are still talking.
Where is the conscience of the world's most powerful leaders???
You would think that our President and every leader in Washington would be working night and day, lots of overtime, all leaves cancelled, no vacations, no entertaining basketball teams or baseball teams at the White House, no trips to their ranches and resort homes, until a detailed, benchmarked plan was ironed out to stop this war.
Why are strategic benchmarks to measure effectiveness questioned?
If you've ever run a business, it is unimaginable that any entity would continue to execute a failed plan without tough measurements. A business would never continue to pour its assets and billions of dollars into a violent strategy that has been inefficient and ineffective in "achieving results." A reputable, value-based business would never agree to continue to send more and more of it's human treasure to be wasted because of a strategy peaking at the top of the diaster scale, such as BUSH's proven ill-conceived, self-initiated Iraq death trap without a clear mission, a concrete plan for resolution with high emphasis on diplomacy and full accountability. In any businesss, he would have been fired long, long ago. Instead, in a much more dangerously powerful assignment, we sit helpless six years into it.
It is also hard to imagine how the most powerful leaders in the world do not practice or realize the sweeping influence of setting the example for others as a means of bringing peace at home and abroad. The obsession of violent, hateful approaches has proven ineffective. Doesn't BUSH see the erosion of the world's view of the US since he began his reign? Is he so blinded by his ego that he doesn't feel any responsibility to find the best answers to resolve the fatal mistakes that have been made? I ask these questions, knowing the unfortunate answers and recognizing that he continues for one reason ----
BECAUSE HE CAN.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. found himself at the same crossroads of conscience like many of us do at this time in history, while he looked at the reality of violence in our neighborhoods and in the Viet Nam War. His message rings out in parallel to our time as we face the realities of growing violence today at home and in IRAQ and other hotspots of injustice throughout the world. He said:
"...it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North... As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion, while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so... if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government." For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands under our violence, I cannot be silent." --- Trumpet of Conscience
I don't know how to change things, but I know it has to do with our collective will. I read once, "The biggest engineering feat is that of human will."
How and why do we remain silent and indifferent to the injustices we see?
Stand up! Speak up in any way you can!
Debbe
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