private grief against national grief
national grief against international grief
grieving in massacres to mourn
On 4/17/07, Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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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