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Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

Political overload
(Paul J. Balles, 27 June 2003)
I wish that the political overload didn't feel so necessary. After spending half a lifetime focusing on making parts of the world a bit more literate and being a goodwill ambassador for my country, I'm in the unenviable position of watching my country being destroyed by frauds. Many of the people I have loved and who have loved me over the years have transferred that love to America. If I just sat silently hoping that all would blow over, I couldn't live with myself. . . . Now the arch Zionists and ultra right wing evangelists have brought my whole house of American cards down around me with the help of - guess who? The American public! You and your friends and mine still in America are letting me and the country down. How? you might ask. Collectively, you're letting America run concentration camps like Guantanamo. You're letting our president and his entire administration get away with lying and cheating America and the world with not so much as a word of complaint. . . . You let a monstrous military might kill thousands of Iraqis for oil. This doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children you allowed to die under US sanctions. You don't challenge the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] crap that was peddled to you. You let Ashcroft and his motley crowd arrest and detain Arabs just for being Arabs. You let Rumsfeld tell off the world and threaten everyone who doesn't cow-tow to the American line, destroying friendly alliances. You let the US, almost single handedly, denigrate and nearly demolish the UN. You proudly claim exemption from criminal trials by the International Criminal Court, allowing America to commit crimes that hundreds of Hitler's henchmen had to pay for. You let Zionists like Perle and Wolfowitz run American foreign policy. . . . you now let Bush remain in office despite the fact that he wasn't elected to it, despite the fact that he's lied about Iraq, despite his ineffectiveness in destroying al-Qaeda and failure to capture either bin Laden or Saddam, despite his running the country into incredible debt, despite his serving his oil cronies' interests over anyone else and despite his tax relief for the wealthy. . . . I'm surrounded by people who know these truths that I speak of. Many Americans know them too but refuse to admit to them. Arabs, Asians, Europeans, Africans and Latin Americans can no longer trust you and me and ordinary Americans who swear by a democracy that has become anything but a democracy, who speak of liberty when they mean control, and who refuse to exercise any significant role as citizens of a democracy.

[Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 34 years.]

posted by Lorenzo 12:15 PM