After all, he's just an old man ....

A while back in this Blog, I quoted a very old member of the Ojibwa saying briefly in reaction to recent events that

" ... I am sorry for you. You whites have only a short time on top of the world. Your greed is destroying you. Your arrogance will guarantee it ..."

I've brought it up again because of the uneasiness the words cause ... and the doubt that we will choose to do nothing about what he implied in his comment. He was right, you know. He was right...and I fear for what we will finally decide to do as a nation.

Who Can We Trust?

I do wonder who we can trust ~ we seem to float along accepting an unconscionable rate of interest demanded by money lenders without a whimper ~ usury in the worst sense ~ health care costs are ought of sight ~ millions cannot afford health care ~ corporate America controls our government, resulting in massive lay-offs of employees and on and on ... and then there is the war ~ more to the point, the wars. As Frank Rich put it in the New York Times: ' It was always the White House's plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there's no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war ... Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military's holes.'

Since Bush took office, he has doubled the federal debt to more than $ 5 Trillion. According to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That's $3 Trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others. Very recently, King Abdullah's nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government's Investment Authority and others to mainline a $ 12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York Bank while at the same time, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. As it has been said, it was no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah's tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it ..

Who can we trust? In all honesty, I don't know.

The Violence of War

A few years ago, James Brady, a Korean War veteran, published an article that may express in part why so many veterans continue to be seriously troubled by their experiences in violent warfare ~ using his own experience as an example. This is not for pity or for gain. It is just one man's life as he sees it, many years after the slaughter in Korea. The following is his
view:

"...Over the years I tried several times to write of all of this, to try to make sense of Korea. Tried to figure out why we went, and so willingly. I had answers for that: We were the children of the Great Depression. A job was a job. More to the point our elder brothers and fathers had fought the Japanese and the Nazis and beaten them. There freshly remained an honorable tradition of duty. Of Service. Of the corny old chromo, patriotism ...

(After the dedication of the Korean War Memorial in Washington, Brady's daughter telephoned asking how it went. He writes the following)

"...I couldn't answer. But sat there on the bed crying, holding the phone and unable to talk. I hadn't realized the hold Korea still had on me. It was some time before I could call her back and talk. Was it the loss of friends, or of my own youth, that weighed on me? Why should I be so emotional after so long a time ... Occasionally in the mail I receive an offer to make a trip back ... why didn't I go and attempt to ... shake off Korea, to write an end to it? ... I answered that myself ... I knew I would never go back to Korea, never sign up for an old soldiers' tour. I didn't want to see the hills again or feel the cold or hear the wind out of Siberia, moaning. I didn't want to disturb the dead ... "

If you've been there, you know the feeling. The extreme was perhaps called "shell shock" years ago. Today the extreme is called by other terms. This may be partly that but actually something else that is up to each of us to describe or try to bury ... regardless, somehow, sometimes, Korea is an unwelcome, alive, memory.

Politics and Religion

With all of the pandering by both political parties to the 'religious right', I thought it would be appropriate to post the following quotation from the Congressional Record ~ a quote from Senator Barry Goldwater in 1981. It is like a breath of fresh air!

"There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A,B,C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism" ...Congressional Record, 16 Sept. 1981)



Think about it ... few folks fight anymore about what they truly believe ...