End The
Endless Wars- And Keep Them Ended-From The Archives-With A Word From Veteran
For Peace Stalwart Ralph Morris
I learned the hard
way, the very hard way that the average citizen learns (in the old days almost exclusively
guys but there were gals) about the government’s policies on war and peace. The
hard way for me was as a bloody foot soldier during the Vietnam War (and also a
few guys from the old Tappan Street neighborhood in Troy, New York who laid down
their heads there and whose names are now, not forgotten, not by me, etched in
black granite down in Washington. But you can learn something in this wicked
old even from serious mistakes or in my case sheer ignorance. Learn the hard
lessons of something like a “people’s” war and peace policy. It was not easy,
it took some time and guidance from my longtime friend Sam Eaton but it has
been deeply ingrained in my mind for many years now.
My pearl of wisdom
is to automatically question, hard question the moves the government, the
Executive, the military and its hangers-on when the war clouds are hovering as
they are today by the American government in places like Russia and China,
smaller places too like Iran and let us not forget the litany of “small still
smoldering wars” that have made the term endless wars a sardonic expression. I
am a child (as is Sam and a number of other writers here) who are old enough to
have been brushed by the post-World War II Cold War that iced up world politics
for two generations, at least.
When I see the
fog of war forming its ugly head of steam of late I want to yell in the streets
for some rationality before this government has itself worked up again to bring
the house down. The average citizen, you and me, can do as suggested by this archival
leaflet to make the general public a little more aware that we should be taking
the first warning signals seriously. That fucking war in Vietnam was good for
that at least.
No comments:
Post a Comment