BuzzFlash Reader Contribution

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The Murderer of Fallujah

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by elaine

All this talk about a re-count and the election and all that is great, and I support it, but I find myself aware, every minute of the day, that children in Iraq are being killed, right now, as you read this. And our tax dollars are paying for it. And it is so wrong.

And I can't stop thinking about it and how privileged and wealthy and healthy and happy I am in my life here in America while my government is wreaking havoc on poor, terrified women, children, and elderly people. That's who we really are bombing, you know. Not the "insurgents." There might be a HANDFUL of true insurgents in Fallujah; the vast majority of the residents are cowering, frightened everyday people like you and me. They are "insurgents" because they are defending their homes! I would be an insurgent if someone were bombing me.

Yet here I sit, at my computer, drinking a nice glass of wine from the Napa Valley, right over the hill from my house; and later I will have a nice dinner with my family and we'll have a fire in the fireplace and then we'll go to sleep in down-covered beds and dream and hope and wonder about tomorrow. And the mothers and babies and aunties and grandpas of Fallujah will wrap their arms around each other in terror. (by "Terror" I mean the REAL kind, not George W. Bush's definition of "terror." He doesn't really know what "terror" means.) And they will eat what little food they can find in their kitchen and then try to go to sleep together, all in the same bed, clinging to each child and mother and auntie and grandpa because they don't know what will happen tonight. They may not wake up. They may die tonight. They won't dream...they will have the nightmare of their lives, brought to them live and in color via smart bombs and shock waves of sound and awesome great balls o' fire (it's SO American, like rock and roll and baseball). Hopefully it will be over quickly; the mother will thank Allah that her child didn't suffer for too long...she died quickly...I'll see her soon, please get this over with and let me out of this Hell.)

I'll wake up in the morning and read about 50 of our soldiers dying in five days...and will automatically wonder how many Iraqi children died during those same five days, and then I will think about what I did over the past five days and feel completely ashamed and guilty that I have so much and they had so little...yet still we took it away.

"When nothing's what you've got, Nothing means a lot." Still, we take it away from them.

Why? Why? Can anybody out there tell me WHY this is happening? Does George W. Bush have THAT MUCH POWER?

How could we give power to a murderer? Why aren't we out in the streets? Where is everybody?

elaine in Petaluma

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION