A Great Nation, Poisoned by War

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/24/4786/

A Great Nation, Poisoned by War
by William A. Collins

Gives our souls,
An awful chill;
Sending soldiers,
Off to kill.

The full-page Army ad in the NAACP magazine reads, “You made them strong. We’ll make them Army Strong.” Besides focusing on these vulnerable minority parents, recruiters are nowadays even trolling homeless shelters, their lures baited with offers of $20,000 to leave “home.” Further, enlistment standards have been lowered for intellectual capacity, emotional stability, and criminal record. These are our own homegrown mercenaries, sifted largely from among the poor.

snip//

But even recruiting has now gone mercenary. At the Veterans for Peace convention in St. Louis this summer, a group of Iraq vets stumbled upon an army recruiting team at the adjacent African American Expo. An impromptu peace demonstration ensued, where the vets discovered that the recruiters were not soldiers at all, but civilians looking military. Such is our shortage of troops.

For Iraqis, of course, the war is infinitely worse. We don’t even count their casualties. We just assume that everyone we kill is an al Qaida “suspect.” This self-fulfilling prophecy has made plain just how sinister those blackguards really are, enlisting women and small children for their nefarious work. Iraqi wounded are simply assumed to die of their injuries in the privacy of their own battered homes. This is probably not a bad guess, since we have contrived to demolish their hospitals and water purification plants, and to chase their doctors abroad.

Our own wounded remain nearly as uncounted. The governor and Connecticut veterans officials have pleaded with the Pentagon and the VA for data on who will be returning in need of care. Unfortunately, such recordkeeping conflicts with a White House policy of downplaying the wounded, so as not to sap enthusiasm for the battle.

And now, verifying what we already knew in our hearts, Alan Greenspan, of all people, has confirmed that the war is actually just about oil. No kidding. Good thing our potential high school recruits don’t read the financial pages. They might begin to wonder just what it is they’re giving “back” to their country. Though it’s possible, I suppose, that kids are in fact rooting for oil company profits. They’ll root for almost anything these days.

But this poisonous oppressing of another country is quietly doing its insidious work on our souls. Even in progressive Connecticut, we’re becoming hardened to dead and dying foreign civilians, homeless refugees, Muslim bashing, and destroyed cultures. Such forsaking of conscience is a heavy price for a little more oil and empire.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

1. Heartbreaking, how the most vulnerable are targeted. And, with the mortgage crisis,

how many kids will join to get money to help their parents keep their homes? :cry:

MKJ