no.
here [BBC], here [Italian state television], here [Daily Kos], here [World War 4 Report], here [Wikipedia], and the discussion in insomnia's journal.
in September 2001, i turned sixteen. i was in my second year of high school. i have grown into something approaching conscientious adulthood with this war, and taken from the perspective of early-morning newspaper headlines if not of the law, it has a war. ["World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones."] this is the most disturbing thing i have read in the newspapers since then.
i know that governments are usually hypocritical; it isn't the job of politicians to be moral. but for the US to use such weapons on enemy soldiers much less on civilians, however unintentional it may be, however it's justified, is indicative of some creeping moral cancer in the government. have they forgotten their own reasons for starting this war? has it become purely an exercise in power? -- was it ever anything but? this kind of hypocrisy belongs to ideologues completely blinded to reality. this kind of indiscriminate murder belongs to armies losing against a force they don't understand.
this ideological blindness is why i'm so profoundly pessimistic about dealing in politics here. i am convinced the government is threatened by nothing. not by contradictions in its own reasons for existing, not by international forces, not by the people.
because to protest, you have to enter into an unspoken contract with the power, you have to enter into the political system. protesters trust that the power cares enough about them and their message either to listen and give them some kind of electoral voice -- or else beat them or jail them. they trust that the power has some sort of stake in their opinions. there's even this little bit of democracy in a totalitarian system -- in one of my classes we read this bit about how the Czech communists were very threatened by the band Plastic People using words like "hovno" and "sračka", and by youth sitting around expressing nihilistic attitudes. even as they were demonstrating control of these various musicians and young people, they were showing how threatened they, the Communist structure, were and how fragile their existence really was. any regime that is frightened of the words "shit" and "crap" is dead in the water.
so this isn't a call to action. and i'm not taking it to the street. i've protested before, and i was struck by how ritualistic it was, how meaningless. i'm convinced the president doesn't care. this system is threatened by nothing. if i trusted my leaders more, i would protest; but i don't.
in September 2001, i turned sixteen. i was in my second year of high school. i have grown into something approaching conscientious adulthood with this war, and taken from the perspective of early-morning newspaper headlines if not of the law, it has a war. ["World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones."] this is the most disturbing thing i have read in the newspapers since then.
i know that governments are usually hypocritical; it isn't the job of politicians to be moral. but for the US to use such weapons on enemy soldiers much less on civilians, however unintentional it may be, however it's justified, is indicative of some creeping moral cancer in the government. have they forgotten their own reasons for starting this war? has it become purely an exercise in power? -- was it ever anything but? this kind of hypocrisy belongs to ideologues completely blinded to reality. this kind of indiscriminate murder belongs to armies losing against a force they don't understand.
this ideological blindness is why i'm so profoundly pessimistic about dealing in politics here. i am convinced the government is threatened by nothing. not by contradictions in its own reasons for existing, not by international forces, not by the people.
because to protest, you have to enter into an unspoken contract with the power, you have to enter into the political system. protesters trust that the power cares enough about them and their message either to listen and give them some kind of electoral voice -- or else beat them or jail them. they trust that the power has some sort of stake in their opinions. there's even this little bit of democracy in a totalitarian system -- in one of my classes we read this bit about how the Czech communists were very threatened by the band Plastic People using words like "hovno" and "sračka", and by youth sitting around expressing nihilistic attitudes. even as they were demonstrating control of these various musicians and young people, they were showing how threatened they, the Communist structure, were and how fragile their existence really was. any regime that is frightened of the words "shit" and "crap" is dead in the water.
so this isn't a call to action. and i'm not taking it to the street. i've protested before, and i was struck by how ritualistic it was, how meaningless. i'm convinced the president doesn't care. this system is threatened by nothing. if i trusted my leaders more, i would protest; but i don't.