“I don’t walk about belief – whether or not we should have started this war. Rather, I walk because we shouldn’t live our lives as if all is normal. People are suffering every moment because of this war – U.S. Soldiers and their families, Iraqi soldiers and civilians and their families – and this question of what we can do to end this suffering should be with us every day.”
a Concord (MA) area resident – in a letter to the editor regarding her own participation in a public vigil each Friday morning at the town center – ‘We Walk for All Who Suffer Because of War.’
this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters
we honor courage in all its forms
cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.
image and poem below the fold
An Iraqi father takes her (sic) daughter for a stroll as the curfew was relaxed for few hours, in Baqouba, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad,Iraq, Sunday, Feb.26, 2006. Bomb blasts and gunfire killed at least seven people, including two U.S. soldiers, in Baghdad and south of the capital Sunday. A 24-hour vehicular ban remained in effect in Baghdad and it’s suburbs as authorities tried to halt the violence that has claimed nearly 200 lives since the Shiite Askariya shrine was destroyed Wednesday in Samarra.
(AP Photo/Mohammed Adan)
An injured father consoles his injured son, both victims of car bomb explosion, in a hospital in Karbala, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, Feb.25, 2006. A car bomb exploded Saturday in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing at least six people, including two women, and injuring more than 52, police said. The attack occurred as Baghdad and three nearby provinces were on a second day of a daytime curfew aimed at dampening the wave of sectarian violence that has killed more than 140 people since the bombing of a Shiite shrine.
(AP Photo/Alaa Al-Marjani)
Against Writing about Children
by Erin Belieu
When I think of the many people
who privately despise children,
I can’t say I’m completely shocked,
having been one. I was not
exceptional, uncomfortable as that is
to admit, and most children are not
exceptional. The particulars of
cruelty, sizes Large and X-Large,
memory gnawing it like
a fat dog, are ordinary: Mean Miss
Smigelsky from the sixth grade;
the orthodontist who
slapped you for crying out. Children
frighten us, other people’s and
our own. They reflect
the virused figures in which failure
began. We feel accosted by their
vulnerable natures. Each child turns
into a problematic ocean, a mirrored
body growing denser and more
difficult to navigate until
sunlight merely bounces
off the surface. They become impossible
to sound. Like us, but even weaker.
– – –
put a meaningful magnet on your car or metal filing cabinet
read Ilona’s important new blog – PTSD Combat
view the pbs newshour silent honor roll (with thanks to jimstaro at booman.)
take a private moment to light one candle among many (with thanks to TXSharon)
support Veterans for Peace
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
remember the fallen
support Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors – TAPS
support Gold Star Families for Peace
support the fallen
support the troops
support Iraq Veterans Against the War
support Military families Speak Out
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
witness every day
Click on the candle to copy the image into your own comment (you can leave it on my server), and/or rate this one – not for mojo, but to leave a small mark after taking this moment.
” I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
from Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Peace
Light A Candle For
Peace, Tolerance, Understanding
and For The Children – Innocence Lost!
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Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens' lives. Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference: US Congressman Ron Paul, in his "Texas Straight Talk" column, August 2004
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{Political fight for Governments future, Which ‘Governement’ Ours or the Puppet U.S. Regime in Baghdad?}
In battle for Baghdad, military adapts, changes
Soldiers say they are engaged in a political fight for government’s future
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post”
Updated: 4:11 a.m. ET Feb. 26, 2006
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"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness." : Justice William O. Douglas
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Opinion: Arrogant, Tone-Deaf and Out of Touch
There may have been overreactions to the Vice President’s inexcusable behavior–not simply his misjudgment when he pulled the trigger, but also the long delay between the accident and his appearance before a friendly television commentator four days later. Comedians and cartoonists had (and are still having) a field day with the incident.
But that poignant, angry reaction from an American soldier in Iraq pointed a finger squarely at the central reason many Americans have deep misgivings about the leadership of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who just don’t see the disconnect between their personal behavior and their public actions. Washington Post commentator David Ignatius called it an arrogance of power — “a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most righteous politicians and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment.”
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Bill Moyers | Restoring the Public Trust
Bill Moyers speaks on the issue of money and politics: Watching these people work is a study of the inner circle at the top of American politics. It is a Dick Cheney world out there - a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests. It is time to fight again. It's not their government, it's your government.
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Fatima Shaik | Masking New Orleans
Fatima Shaik: On Mardi Gras Day, the nation will be looking to New Orleans to see if we are wearing masks. We’ll be wearing them in New Orleans, but they’re being worn in Washington, DC, too. That’s because the face of our tragedy is being covered up with a big smile – we are having a party and pretending that the poor people can just go away.
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IRS Finds Sharp Increase in Illegal Political Activity
The IRS said yesterday that it saw a sharp increase in prohibited political activity by charities and churches in the last election cycle, a trend that it aims to reverse as the country heads into the midterm elections.
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Published on Friday, February 24, 2006 by Candide’s Notebooks
Iraq’s Cambodian Jungle: How American `Nation-Building’ Fueled Civil War
by Pierre Tristam
The standard line about Iraq right now is that the country is on the verge of civil war. That “simmering hatreds” are boiling to the surface. That “sectarianism” is to blame. All those regurgitated clichés of the Orientalist canon may well be true. But what convenient detractions from a three-year-old certainty rendered by the American invasion. What ideal way to shift the blame, indemnify the invader, and make this third anniversary of Iraq’s “liberation,” approaching at the speed of a panicked Bradley Fighting Vehicle, look like a job gone awry only because Iraqis couldn’t get along. Sure, the destruction of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, allegedly by Sunni militants, was not going to get a kinder reception than the destruction of the 16 th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, in India, by Hindus, in December 1992.
===“Never again shall one generation of veterans abandon another.”
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
By Langston Hughes: Click HERE to read entire item.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Volatile Days…
Thanks for this, Rub. I love the poem, “like us, but even weaker” – perfect.
Iraq Attacks Kill 27, Including 2 U.S. GIs
Put an end to this endless war!
the eyes of children
need scenes of safety
not shock and awe