from recovering neo-con, Andrew Sullivan. To the point.
Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police
force that was far too small to even respond to most of
them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and
their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers
throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the
brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having
finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been
murdered or not.
This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT
campus police chief and university president for
misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the
same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as
enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not
human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and
fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having
destroyed the institutions of order in their country?
(found by Susan Schultz, the well known poet, publisher one in Hawaii)
> From the WOM-PO list
>
> Lucinda Roy has an op-ed in the NY Times:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/opinion/17roy.html
>
>
> On 4/17/07, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Jane Smiley on guns etc (in Huffingtonpost today:
>>
>>>> But that's how it is with the right wing, isn't it? Grievance is
>> something they do, no matter how much power they have. They are
>> shocked, shocked, that they don't have all the power, shocked and
>> victimized and angry. You could tell it in Bush's response to today's
>> shooting. First he said he was shocked and saddened. Then he said
>> everyone has the right to bear arms. He wouldn't want to let any of
>> those NRA-types imagine for a second that any amount of senseless
>> killing could possibly shake his commitment to a fully-armed populace.
>>
>> Here's what I think about guns--guns have no other purpose than killing
>> someone or something. All the other murder weapons Americans use, from
>> automobiles to blunt objects, exist for another purpose and sometimes
>> are used to kill. But guns are manufactured and bought to kill. They
>> invite their owners to think about killing, to practice killing, and,
>> eventually, to kill, if not other people, then animals. They are
>> objects of temptation, and every so often, someone comes along who
>> cannot resist the temptation--someone who would not have murdered, or
>> murdered so many, if he did not have a gun, if he were reduced to a
>> knife or a bludgeon or his own strength. I wish that the right wing
>> would admit that, while people kill people and even an "automatic"
>> weapon needs a shooter, people with guns kill more people than people
>> without guns do.<<
>>
>> Doug
>> Douglas Barbour
>> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
>> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
>> (780) 436 3320
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>>
>> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>>
>>
>> lipsynching awe all the way to the grave of the unknown onus:
>> memory stutter; one smidgen, one scantling of thank.
>>
>> Dennis Lee
>>
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