March 12, 2009
Widows, Orphans, and the Brutes Who Made Them
The title of the United Nation’s, 2009 Unicef report reads: Iraq’s Toll: About 1 Million Killed, 4.5 Million Displaced, 1-2 Million Widows, 5 Million Orphans.
George W. Bush invokes God. He says in his 2003 State of the Union Address: “… For so many in our country – the homeless and the fatherless, the addicted – the need is great. Yet there’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people. …” The hymn he referenced comes from the refrain of, Hymn Power in the Blood, written in 1899 by Lewis E. Jones. It goes: There is pow’r, pow’r,/wonder working pow’r/In the blood/of the Lamb.
Five million new orphans, all lambs slain, their families and identities all run-through with screw drivers, knives and shrapnel. They have been shot, bombed, robbed, raped, tortured, butchered and murdered before their young eyes. Who will care for them, for them and the 1-2 million new widows left to fend for themselves in a country completely and utterly devastated, a wailing and disfigured country of 25 million, left to bury over 1 million of their civilian dead. Those are the innocents caught in the crossfire of war. They have another million more to bury and mourn, the deaths of combatants killed in open conflict, all sons, husbands, fathers, farmers, teachers, bakers, police and small business owners. The report does not collate nor calculate the effect on other millions of children without schools, without teachers, or a public without waste or sewage treatment, without clean water to drink, or electricity, health care, social services, medicine, jobs, transportation, food, physical safety, infrastructure or money. After eight years of an unlawful and unwarranted American invasion and occupation of Iraq, whose dream of liberation, freedom, and Christian love was that State of the Union speech and others like it, meant to address?
George W. Bush invoked God. He affirmed the goodness, idealism, and faith of the American people. There was applause and cheery confirmation. Yes, God is great and the faith of the American people is strong. On this, Bush scores high. But not a word about the 1-2 million new Iraqi widows and their 5 million new orphans he created. Instead, he tossed a nod of concern to the millions of homeless and fatherless he, George W. Bush and his entire cabal of swindlers, liars, crooks and murderous hyenas have created here at home. But not a word of care or concern for the others, those millions he made over there. No credible explanation regarding the injuries and injustice we inflicted upon those women and children in our mighty war against an undeclared enemy. Not a word to establish credible purpose, nothing about liability or responsibility for damages and devastation, silent in the glaring face of crimes against humanity, not a whisper regarding treason against their own country and Constitution. In other words, questions not asked remain questions unanswered.
Besides, in the same bible Bush swears and takes his oaths upon, it says in Psalm 67: 6-7, The father of orphans and the defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling. God gives a home to the forsaken; he leads forth prisoners to prosperity. Therefore, responsibility and reparations all belong to God. It is for Him to do. God is the power and those in power are His priests.To doubt this is to doubt the existence of God, the truth of the Bible, as well as the goodness, idealism and faith of the American people. Blasphemy is unpatriotic. Belief itself, has become the litmus test, the measure of loyalty to America. The church and state are one, united in principle, policy and prayer. One lie reinforces the other. The mental sponge of the believer is prepared to sop up all the political slop thrown at it. The bigger the lie, the bolder the liar—the more fierce and fervent shall be their belief. Hence, the dumber one is, the more loyal and more graced by God they are. How nice and tidy. How squeaky clean. How sinless and spotless their barbeque bibs.
But what about the rest of us, those with a conscience who insist on meaning, reason and responsibility? What about those who demand the dignity of truth, or those who will defend their rights and freedom for the sheer sake of sanity itself? They ask how, against what measure of recompense shall the suffering we brought to Iraq be measured? It is an unforgiveable weight now upon the psyche of every American living and yet born. It is an existential moment that defines America. What does it mean to be a free citizen here in the land of the free and the home of the brave? It is the premier question necessary for the function of consciousness itself. The language of war and peace has become as pertinent as the weather, since, after all, the aerosol of depleted uranium exploded in Iraq or Afghanistan rides the same winds that blow upon America’s fruited plains and into the lungs and blood of young pregnant mothers in New York, Topeka, Seattle, and Rio de Janeiro. The emerging human corollary to economic globalization is that war against anyone, anywhere, is war against everyone, everywhere.
That is why, real men do not kill. They ask questions and arrive at mutually beneficial solutions. They ask, for example, what sort of demented mentality causes and inflicts such a scale of suffering upon others for their own selfish profit and then go on to ignore and deny it ever happened? It must be asked and must be answered, it is a line in the sand of our times. The battlefield, the strategic terrain of engagement is cerebral, it is moral and has cognitive markers. It is an intersection or crossroads where self-interest and concern for others interchange and become the other. This global realization is a fact of life. One cannot be without the other — east and west is as left and right. The question is how to implement and administer such an understanding. To what purpose and to whose benefit shall it be designed? Will the rights and welfare of children ever come before slash and burn economics? Will we continue to fight wars that benefit the few at the cost of so much to so many? Will the American people ever wake up or recover? Will they ever elect an enlightened, reality-based government that serves the people, not its destroying corporations? Will we replace failed leadership with new models of the world that are no longer top-down and flat, but round and interconnected?
These numbers, these statistics of wholesale industrialized mayhem and murder, its profit-driven pollution of mind and matter, the blatant, cruel greed that generates this madness now marks the impossible degree of restitution necessary to count America civilized. Fifty years since the last outcry against what caused Auschwitz, we wonder what happened. What happened to, Never Again! ? The lawyers, pundits and politicians will say that was then, it merely defined the times. The cynical and predatory will call it a new day, a new world order, a new rationale for the repetition of history, all progress in the advancemet of horror and mass murder. There will be talk about neo-colonialism in the new millennium. It will generate advertisements for products to suit the lying fascist pig within us all. News anchors will defer to corporate government and replay loops of breaking 24/7 infomercials until all the numbers, all the statistics, all the costs of waging war for profit will drown, become mute and forgotten in the drone of meaningless chatter.
How does one embrace these unimaginable tolls of human suffering and walk the streets of America? In what guise, in what mood or frame of mind does one live among the deluded and the dead, the living dead, among all the apathetics of the left and right who have given up, who will not vote no matter who or what is at stake? How does a man or woman behave in a nation where seventy percent of its population believe in the literal truth of their bible stories, who staunchly defend the historical fact of supernatural fictions, yet deny the existence of or any responsibility for the 1-2 million widows and 5 million orphans that their beliefs enabled through political and military policy?
To be or not to be in this American moment is to face a new dimension of miscreants and horror thus far unvisited by human experience; it is without thought, or established rules. The trendy angst of political, spiritual and sexual ambiguity that inflated the balloon of consumer distraction no longer hides the issues. Pleas of ignorance no longer work. There are no more bystanders, no more audience. All eyes have seen, all ears have heard. All America and all the world is witness. Therefore, the question is whether it is better to be conscious or unconscious. To become conscious we must ask how these insane travesties and gratuitous upheavals of war began? How will they stop, how will they heal and repair? How will they cease forever? How do we make sense of the lies that led us to war, of the mushroom cloud that never was, of the wonder working pow’r in the blood of the Lamb… that spills out and floods the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah, Kabul and Peshewar? Make sense of the true-believers and their apathetic allies, their fears, their cynicism, frauds and delusions. Ask why states with the highest church turnout also have the highest number of per capita subscriptions to online pornography sites. They are red-states, ones with the highest illiteracy, the most unemployed and the lowest health care ratings. Ask about their beliefs that create the nullity of mind necessary to take fiction for fact and fact for fiction. Make sense of this and we make sense of ourselves. Avoid this and we void our rights to exist, we become a cancelled nation adrift in a land of the living dead. Then, how many of us will join the ranks of those 1-2 million widows, 5 million orphans, 4.5 million displaced persons, and over 1 million excess deaths due to violence? Then, will we speak out?
I propose, for starters that every person, corporation and institution that received tax-payer money and made profits from the Iraq/Afghanistan mess, forfeit all assets into a trust fund dedicated to the support, education, and health care of every one of the 1-2 million Iraqi widows, 5 million orphans, and five million displaced persons that we wantonly and ruthlessly butchered in behalf of corporate American interests — all blessed by America and its God. Yet now, America itself has been plundered and abandoned by the very same institutions at war in Iraq. We have all become victims of the same American empire, with its bloodthirsty engines and psychotic machines of war that gorge on the chaos and miseries it needs to thrive and maintain. Now, all sides must seize the reigns and repair because until and unless Iraq and Afghanistan can heal and repair, America will lay in ruins — together in blood, together in survival or defeat.
It was blind faith that put us in this situation, blind faith that allowed it all to happen, and blind faith that keeps us in our place. It is a disease, a disabling mental disease on par with the Black Death of the 1300s, the Great Influenza of 1918, and the ongoing battles against malaria and AIDS. It elects liars and thieves, finances death squads, and promotes disaster capitalism all in the name of peace, freedom, and religious ceremony. It makes its own victims cheer to hear of a captive labor force beaten, raped and worked to death for cheap imported goods. Yet blind faith would spit at the thought of free citizens free to exercise their skills in a free world. Blind faith must be exposed for the disease it is or we will all see the end of everything all too soon. It was blind faith, as if there were any other, that created 1-2 million Iraqi widows, 5 million orphans, and caused the deaths of over 1 million civilians. It was Americans who dropped those bombs, caused those deaths, made that money, and robbed our treasury, not the wonder working power of God. There is a difference. One lives and breathes, one is presumed real and culpable. The other is empty and destructive, a self-enabling delusion. It is the difference between mice and men, light and dark, life or death.