The War is Ended

Received this from a friend. Thought I'd share........

by David Bonello

I grew up in the budding
prosperity of the fifties when so many lives seemed to have been
designed by Horatio Alger; when anyone could still grow up to be
president, as long as he was male. The only limit was your
imagination. Poverty seemed to be something foreign. The middle
class burgeoned as everyone became the Jones that everyone else was
keeping up with.

By the time I could walk and
make primitive sentences, the war in Korea had ended. It had been a
dirty little war that didn’t bring out the flag waving, so I was
told, that the “big one” had. Veterans of the Korean conflict
blended back into society, their service quickly forgotten.

I remember neighbors building
bomb shelters. From what I knew of nuclear warfare, it didn’t seem
worth surviving. My only prayer was that the initial blast would
kill us all and we wouldn’t have to sit around dying horribly from
the nuclear fallout.

The enemy was communism.
Catholic school sent us home with propaganda, depicting graphic
executions that to this day I cannot get out of my head. For high
school I attended a Catholic military academy that kept up the
propaganda, showing 16 millimeter films of even more executions. It
was there that I learned that a bullet placed squarely into the head
of a human being can make that head explode. In my mind, the
flashing images replayed over and over.

In Military classes, we watched
films of military advisors in a far away country training soldiers
to shoot small arms, use mortars, and fire heavy artillery. The
country was populated by small brownish people with slanted eyes.
The enemy was communism.

I was not a good student. I was
a rebel, a maverick. Tell me to do this, and I’ll go do that. Tell
me not to do that, and I’ll do it two times. Possibly three.

I was not going to college. No
college would have me. Since the draft was on, I knew exactly where
I was going, so I made the decision to go there on my own terms.

I was excited. All my life I’d
wanted to be John Wayne. I had been bottle fed on war movies and the
thought of dying bravely and proudly for my country had been seeded
in my head since early childhood. Television made good patriots.

So I served. It’s as if the job
chose me, because I was of the breed who took risks, hardly followed
the rules, and at the end of the day, the job was done and done
better than expected. I flew Cobras. Even today, when old vets I’ve
flown with meet me, they always shake their heads and smile. I was a
rebel, a maverick. When I finished my tour, I was tossed out of the
army on my ear. There is no room for mavericks in a peacetime army.

It wasn’t till years later when
I read the history of Vietnam and of Ho Chi Minh that I had learned
that communism was not really the enemy; that my country had lied to
me.

The more I read the more I
became impressed with Ho Chi Minh. He had asked America to help him
establish a free Vietnam; free of foreign oppression so that they
could have what we all have in America and what every country
deserves: self rule.

I’d read his Declaration of
Independence; it had been lifted right out of Jefferson’s
Declaration. The only reason he’d formed an alliance with the
communists was that we’d rejected him, but the communists did not,
and they extracted a heavy price for their assistance.

That was when I became
political. I loved my country and not just the fields, the
mountains, the deserts, and the forests; not just the melting pot of
nationalities and shining faces of kids playing street-ball, but the
ideas of America. I loved the moral and ethical America that
promised freedom and liberty to all, beckoning across oceans, “Give
us your tired, your hungry, your poor, your enslaved masses.” That
was the America I loved and it was that America I was politically
determined to foster and support.

I was no longer naïve. War does
that to people. So does a liberal education. I knew that if I looked
into the closets of America I’d find acts of genocide, plunder, and
violence. But one cannot fix the past. We can fix only the future,
and that starts by rethinking the NOW.

Well, I’m here to tell you, I
failed. Yeah, I was political; I showed up at caucuses, I worked for
candidates, I argued the big issues, but I got distracted and at
some point in time I decided I needed a bigger piece of the pie. My
goals shifted, and I got rich. While I got rich, the country fell
ill. I didn’t notice it at first; I was too busy making and spending
money.

I tried to become political
again, but the forces of opposition were just too powerful.
Corporations that were once under the control of congress were now
in charge of congress. What had happened to voting reform, ethics,
and justice I had no idea. It had all just vanished.

And now, it seems we’re
quagmired in an endless war with terrorism.

However, it is my sad duty to inform
the American people that the war is ended. It is my sad duty to
inform you that we’ve lost the war. The terrorists have won.

You see, the goal of the
terrorists was not to kill us all, but to destroy America. Sadly,
the America I and many of you grew up in is gone, finished,
destroyed. The terrorists have won.

When the government, in the name
of progress, turns our wetlands, our wildlife, our national
treasures over to corporate profiteers, the terrorists have won. 

When the government concerns
itself with only the wealthiest 2%, and neglects the poor, the
children, the ill, and the average worker, the terrorists have won.

When we allow our government to
bankrupt the nation while pandering to the wealthy, the terrorists
have won.

When we ignore our veterans,
slash their budgets, and give those funds back the wealthy in tax
breaks, the terrorists have won.

When an attorney general can
twist international law and argue that torture by our military and
corporate mercenaries is legal and just, the terrorists have won.

When an attorney general can
dismantle the Constitution, crushing our basic civil rights while
calling it the PATRIOT ACT, the terrorists have won.

When an American citizen, of any
color, can be arrested in secret, deprived of his Fifth Amendment
rights, and jailed for an indeterminate time with no formal charges,
the terrorists have won.

When
we start rounding up Muslims just because they are Muslim, the
terrorists have won.

When facts can be twisted in a
lascivious run up to war, and a CIA agent responsible for tracking
weapons of mass destruction is outed in a political dirty
trick that was initiated in the White House, the terrorists have
won.

When evidence of twisted facts
and cherry picked intelligence comes forward in the form of so many
smoking guns while the perpetrators ignore them and the overseeing
bodies follow in suit, the terrorists have won.

When
we start a preemptive war for reasons that continually change,
the terrorists have won.

When everything we know about
the humane treatment of prisoners is trashed and discarded, with
human beings “renditioned” to countries where they can be tortured
by proxy, the terrorists have won.

When our soldiers are trained to
violate conventions that had once established our country as the
moral authority, the terrorists have won.

When our president uses double
speak, directly out of Orwell’s 1984, such as, “When I say
war, I mean peace,” the terrorists have won.

When our president tells us that
nothing has changed, that wiretapping requires a court order, and
then it is discovered that he’s been wiretapping without court
orders, the terrorists have won.

When the president claims that
the old law just didn’t allow him to “protect” us from the
terrorists, thus admitting he’s broken the law, and congress refuses
do its job, investigate and oversee the actions of the executive
branch, the terrorists have won.

Jefferson tell us:
"When a question arises,
whether any particular law or appointment is still in force, we are
to examine, not whether it was pronounced by the ancient or present
organ, but whether it has been at any time revoked by the authority
of the nation….” When his words ring hollow and the rule of law
means nothing, the terrorists have won.

When Jefferson has told us that
“Public opinion
lord of the universe,” and that it is “the people, to whom all
authority belongs,” and then the current president steps up to a
microphone and states, “You can't let the public opinion polls and
focus groups ... cause you to abandon what you believe,” the
terrorists have won.

When congress allows
corporations to oversee the laws that are supposed to oversee
corporations, the terrorists have won.

When congress treats
corporations better than it treats the electorate, the terrorists
have won.

When elected officials turn
their backs on the will of the people, the terrorists have won.

When congress
proposes a bill that will prosecute reporters who write about
government surveillance, the terrorists have won.

When congress proposes
legislationthat would make it illegal for anyone to disclose
illegal eavesdropping by the Bush administration, the terrorists
have won.

When we give up our rights and
freedoms and ignore the rule of law and everything that has made
this nation great, the terrorists have not only won, but every
American has lost. We’ve lost our country, we’ve lost our liberty,
and we’ve lost all that once made America a beacon of light to the
rest of the world.

The terrorists have won and they
will continue to win, as long as they are in the White House and in
congress.

 

©
Copyright 2006 Minnesota
Wellness Publications, Inc.



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On edit for link: Link

It's great....wish I had a link

The government Are the terrorists.

"other" those characteristics which one can't see in ones self. Everything that this and many previous administrations have accussed straw men of being, were in fact the characteristics they were displaying themselves, while in denial all the time.
The piece would have read better if the word terorist had been replaced by the word fascist.

even where they refuse to read.