Poverty Is Not an Accident

Poverty Is Not an Accident
Nelson Mandela

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

I'm up

You are reading http://livinginthehood.blogspot.com

I have charlie horses in my calves, from running up and down the halls so much yesterday. For nonUSA people: a charlie horse is a muscle cramp. No, I don't know why. But there you go. Crazy Americans....

Oh, heck, now I'll have to look up the origins of "charlie horse."

I'm dopey sleepy, but obviously, I can blog.

There's breakfast, lunch packing, a shower and a drive to the duck pond and KUNM yet to do.

It's five; I'm listening to the news. Boy, I'm sure glad I'm not a Halliburton employee in Iraq right now! dang....

They showed "The Patriot" on TV the other night. I guess they thought it'd make me more sympathetic to our invasion of Iraq. But it backfired.

All I saw was a single parent, whose country is invaded and whose kids and home are being destroyed, fighting off a killing machine invader force, determined to be independent of colonization.

It was a pretty serious depiction of the horror of war. It was a good depiction of how a pacifist homebody can revert to blood-spattered, snarling savagery, when one's children are under attack.

It portrays sabotage, acts of terrorism, infiltration and geurilla tactics as honorable: "by any means necessary." Of course, this bunch consciously chose to stop killing the wounded. I assume women and children and other civilians would have been off limits, but that's theoretical, as the British army had none.

But it was still a choice; they could have gone the other way, and had, in the past. That's the problem with violent solutions: the hair's width between "honorable" and savage is too easily and frequently crossed. In fact, the concept of "honor" during war...I'm not talking courage; I'm talking killing strategies...is a form of self deceptive psychosis, as near as I can tell. Down to the wire, killing a person is killing a person, period.

And that's got to make one crazy, on some level.

Maybe not permanently, although I doubt it, and maybe not debilitatingly, but it's got to be a permanent paradigm shift in consciousness, I'd think. And not a healthy one.

Well, that's enough of THAT from me! Now I'll have the damn military spiders, sniffing my blog, thinking I'm a sympathiser with the Iraqi insurgency. Depends how you define "sympathiser," I guess. THEY don't mean compassionate to women and children; THEY mean providing aid and comfort to the "enemy." If I can provide aid and comfort to Iraqi women and kids, I am. The male machismo crap bores me silly and pisses me off; I want nothing to do with aggression.

But 50,000 people, mostly women and kids, are refugees from Faluja right now. You think the US military has any facilities set up for them?! Hell no.

We couldn't stop looting of priceless treasures; you think we're going to protect peasants? Shoot, it's population control.

Yes, we've done a wonderful thing in Iraq; old rivals, Sunni and Shea, have joined hands...and forces...to throw our arrogant butts out of there.

Good work, Rumsfeld, Wolfe, Halliburton! Great job.

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