Some Vital News
Those who know me will testify that I almost never use the language of imperative in dealing with people. I firmly believe encouragement is more powerful than compulsion, that the kiss motivates more than the rebuke.
But this one time, I dare to charge you with failure. I dare to stand appalled at your apathy, agape at your ignorance, and I warn you never to protest --
"Oh I wish I'd known the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence were all destroyed, along with the principles on which America was built."
"Oh I never realized the PATRIOT acts, presidential orders, and decrees and actions of officials violated articles I, IV, V, VI, and VIII of the Constitution, because I never committed those articles to memory."
"If only someone told me U.S. government and security forces were torturing, murdering, and holding in indefinite solitary confinement innocent people, not just in Saddam Hussein's chambers in Iraq, not just in Afghanistan, or Guantánamo Bay, or in dozens of secret facilities all over the world, but even in our own land."
"But no-one brought to my attention that the Bush administration used radioactive weapons, napalm, and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or that they plotted to use yet more destructive weapons in other conflicts in the future."
"I wish someone had told me the Bush administration was dumping asbestos and mercury into the air without limit, without disclosure, and arsenic into our water supplies, and raw sewage into our coastal waters, or that they tore our landscapes to pieces and slaughtered our wildlife."
"Oh I never recognized the many ways the Republican Party faked elections and pulled off an even more spectacular theft in 2004."
"How could I have known the Bush administration engineered the removal, or attempted removal, of democratically elected governments in other countries such as Haiti or Venezuela? Or that it financed and supported the apartheid policies of Israel's government?"
"Who would have thought the Bush administration had plenty of warning about September 11 and chose to do nothing? Or that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were in the pipeline (pun intended) long before 9/11 provided the requisite pretext?"
"What kind of murderous instinct informed the Bush administration's falsifications and coverups regarding lethal air toxicity at Ground Zero as they told people to go back to work immediately after September 11?"
"Why did I not realize that, even while the occupation of Iraq was falling apart, that the Bush administration was stealthily laying the groundwork for post-election invasion of yet another country, Iran?"
"Could it be that the rate of major terrorist incidents in the world rose to seven per year in just the first three years of Bush's so-called "War on Terrorism" from an average of one every two years in the 1993 to 2001 period?"
"Oh why was I silent when the few whistleblowers who dared to reveal administration duplicity were hounded, persecuted and vilified?"
"Is it possible that during the Bush years, the U.S. budget deficit grew larger, compared with the size of our economy, than Argentina's was just before its financial meltdown in 2001?
"How was I supposed to know the Democratic Party leadership supported the worst excesses of the Bush administration, spent their 2004 convention in Boston clamoring for war, and shut out all dissenting voices with a zeal even the Republican Party would admire?"
"Why did the major newscasts of networks ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS conduct less than 1% of their interviews with antiwar voices just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq?"
"Oh now I understand that by all historical, international, and U.S. standards of law, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and their colleagues are all war criminals."
"Oh I finally see just how profoundly anti-American the Bush administration was, and how casually they committed acts of treason against America."
"Oh now I realize Orwell's prophecies in his book '1984' are fulfilled today. I see how fascism comes in many colors, even disguised as democracy."
"So why did I opt to be a part of the mass delusion manufactured by government and propagated by television, newspapers and radio? Why did I refuse to love the Truth and so be saved?"
...
Do I claim to have the complete picture? Of course not. But I see among most of my friends a damp lethargy of spirit that offends me to the core. For Christ's sake, wake up! (Not blasphemy but prayer!) Your ignorance is killing people!
My key suggestion: listen to 'Democracy Now' at radio station WBAI (99.5 FM in the New York City area). You will learn more in one hour there than you could ever hope to learn from a lifetime of listening elsewhere.
'Democracy Now' is broadcast every weekday from 9am to 10am. Although you may be at work then, all the shows are playable any time, and nearly all the transcripts posted, at www.DemocracyNow.org. Take for instance the Aug. 11 interview of Kevin and Joyce Lucey, parents of a U.S. soldier whose experiences in Iraq drove him to suicide. Or the devastating analysis of media failure in an Aug. 13 interview with media critic, Michael Massing.
I also highly recommend the 'NOW' television show at PBS (Fridays at 8.30 pm), along with the websites of the U.K.-based newspapers 'The Guardian' and 'The Independent'. In addition, I have striven to compile the most effective Internet-based articles, arranged by both date and subject, at my own Website.
I'm not asking you to become activists, sign petitions, wear badges, go on marches, back the Green Party, or contribute to worthy groups such as WBAI, PBS, the Natural Resources Defense Council, or the American Civil Liberties Union. But paying attention to the few sources of integrity left out there, staying informed and informing others, would be a very good start!
Nor am I
advocating that you shun the Democratic Party, even though
it has silenced its most prophetic voices and exiled its
best minds. (I can't resist likening this November's election
to the upcoming movie, "Alien vs. Predator,"
for which the posters declare: "Whoever Wins…We
Lose").
Nor do I ignore other ways of getting at the truth, such as the slew of new books that have come out, the documentary 'Outfoxed', or Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 911', although Moore's film softly veils some of the horrors it describes and presents revelations years out of date.
I pray most earnestly -- and the prayers of a righteous man are powerful and effective -- that the hands, mouth and eyes of the Bush administration will be bound in the spiritual realm, so that they shall also be bound in the earthly realm, that the reign of chaos and destruction and terror shall be stopped.
If the Bill of Rights in our Constitution were upheld, many of these problems would go away. But it isn't. And I do not complain of mere infringement, but of blatant, flagrant, categoric, vicious, and routine mutilation of our core principles and very identity as Americans.
Even now, our leaders are torturing my brothers in Guantánamo Bay and raping my sisters in Baghdad. It makes no difference that the victims are moslem, or that I am christian, or that they look different, speak differently, or dress differently. For they are all fellow members of the family of humanity. They may be maimed, starved, brutalized, sodomized, or diseased, but they remain my family. They are not other, they are the same. They feel pain as I do, bleed as I do, weep as I do. Thank God for the whiteness of my skin and my non-Arabic name! For by these attributes I am protected! At least for now! But for how long, when God's image in all of mankind is held so cheaply? How long, when our leaders recrucify Christ again and again?
They butcher in the name of Security, but what kind of security is nourished in the blood of innocents and erected out of their bones? What kind of ambition attempts to elevate itself by treading others underfoot? As Shakespeare warns us, "There is no sure foundation set on blood,/ No certain life achieved by others' death." And "he that steeps his safety in true blood/ Shall find but bloody safety and untrue."
If we must have a monarchy, or if we must go the way of ancient Rome with its succession of despotic and deranged emperors, then let us at least call this country what it is -- an Empire -- instead of pretending we are either a democracy or a republic with so-called separation of powers. Let Congress be renamed the Privy Council and our judiciary be the court of the Star Chamber! And, as the king's courtiers have already laid claim to their full privileges and royal dispensations, let us grant these landed gentry their proper titles of Lord Dick, Sir Donald, Viceroy Colin, and Lady Con!
As I look back on these words, I realize I have cast my rebuke across an entire distribution list, that there are some individuals to whom this does not apply. But I am compelled to speak, I am driven to pierce the pall of indifference and indolence that blankets the hearts and dulls the spirits of most Americans. If, Heaven forbid, my worst fears are realized, you can't say that nobody warned you!
Sincerely,
Ian Reed
Aug. 15, 2004
