The American people are complicit of the actions of their leaders

Connect: Our bombs,
Their Little Bodies
By Norla Antinoro, Ph.D

The front page of every paper I looked at yesterday carried pictures of children dead at the hands of Israeli bombs. Bodies covered with scarves or shawls, as if to protect them from the brutal sun. Tiny feet showing the age of far too many of these victims. These were not terrorists. They were not soldiers or spies. They were children. Learning to find a place in the world. Was the next great peace maker killed today, before she learned to speak and draw to her side the hearts of the people she would have led, if not for the bombs? What crime was committed by the pregnant woman who died, taking with her the unborn child she carried?

In each of our lives there are defining moments. Moments of transcendent joy, moments of unremitting sorrow, moments of breathless anticipation. They are not many, but they are the moments we recall, the moments that make us who we are. They are the moments that make us able to connect with the people around us in deep and abiding ways.

Remember the breathless joy of holding a child you love and seeing the look of wonder in the child’s eyes as it gazes unfocussed at a world all new to be discovered. Remember the feeling of warmth and happiness as a child you love unwraps a hoped for Christmas gift. Remember the feeling of pride and hope as your child took their first trembling steps, or rode away on that bicycle without you to hold it steady, wobbling a little and then firm and smooth and strong.

We have moments that define our shadows as well. The death of a beloved pet, carelessly left a space just big enough for escape into the street and the still broken form that we found when we returned. The day we found that the one job we really wanted to do was forever beyond reach because we could not see well enough or were too tall or to weak or too small or too female. The feeling of emptiness and loss when that person we loved best of all lay broken beyond repair and dying. The wrenching grief when you felt the life within you die and wash away on a river of blood. The loss when your mother, sister, son, or wife died too soon.

Remember these moments. They are what make us human. They are what make us able to understand our fellows fully. They connect us all, except the sociopaths who strew death and devastation all around them without a care because they cannot connect and do not know the moments either joy or sorrow.

Now reach into yourself, remembering these defining moments and understand the feelings of a parent digging frantically through the rubble of what moments ago was their modest home, finding only the lifeless body of that beloved child. Think. Connect. That was your child lying broken in the ruins of your home. You do not know why some madman blew your house into shards of destruction. It is beyond all ken. You are a simple person. You go to work each day, you love your family, and you have no role in the larger stage where statesmen contend and armies clash. Yet it is your child who lies dead and broken in the rubble of your modest home in your simple neighborhood where once children’s’ voices were raised in laughter as they learned and grew in wonder.

When my sister died, I remember my mother’s face as she said “A mother is not supposed to outlive her children. It isn’t right.” I remember that grief as raw and bottomless, a wound that would never heal.

It isn’t right that we are visiting such sorrow on the world. It isn’t right that we send our children to kill another woman’s children half a world away.

The front page of every paper I looked at yesterday carried pictures of children dead at the hands of Israeli bombs. Bodies covered with scarves or shawls, as if to protect them from the brutal sun. Tiny feet showing the age of far too many of these victims. These were not terrorists. They were not soldiers or spies. They were children. Learning to find a place in the world. Was the next great peace maker killed today, before she learned to speak and draw to her side the hearts of the people she would have led, if not for the bombs? What crime was committed by the pregnant woman who died, taking with her the unborn child she carried?

If you are not horrified by the actions of your country yet, then you simply have not tried to see what is happening. You have looked away too often, too soon. Really look at what your country and her allies are doing half a world away. In Lebanon the seeds of terror are being planted deep and well watered with the blood of martyrs, not by wild eyed Islamic clerics demanding the death of the infidel, but by the power hungry, foolish leaders of Israel and the United States. Like dragon’s teeth, every bomb we drop brings new enemies.

We stand pariah to the world and justly so. There is a weary rage in me that knows no direction. No target properly presents itself. No proper expression comes to mind for that rage. No amount of giving vent to that rage will breathe life into one dead and decaying tiny corpse. Weeping brings no relief.

I could vent my rage at Bush but he is not alone in this terrible crime. We have a mass murderer for a president. Driven by a lust for power and control, he and his cronies have visited horror on people who have never raised a hand in threat or harm to him or his. Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice do not carry the entire blame for the horror that is the Middle East right now. We are complicit. We have turned away and chosen not to see. We have allowed this monstrous set of wars to continue because we have not taken the time to reach out with compassion and understand the people who are being destroyed by our country’s actions. We do not connect with the wrenching sorrow of the mother whose child is found broken and lifeless in the ruins of their home that was standing until our bombs brought it all down. We turn away. It is too unpleasant and we cannot do anything about it.

This time, don’t let yourself turn away. Don’t just look and say “how sad.” Connect. That is your child, your home, your neighborhood. Feel the loss. Know what harm we are causing. You know the joy of those defining moments. You know the hope and anticipation those parents felt. You know the sorrow of the defining loss. Feel it now, for the fallen in Iraq, whatever their nationality. Feel the loss of the Lebanese mother whose child lies dead in her arms from Israeli bullets. Feel the sorrow of the American father whose only child is being buried today under a flag, too young, promise unfulfilled. Feel it. Know how wrong it is. And decide we have had enough. Bring our troops home. Stop sending bombs to Israel. Support the UN efforts to broker a true cease fire and a lasting peace.

Perhaps we cannot stop this war today; not the one in Iraq nor the one in Afghanistan nor the one in Lebanon. But we can stand as witness to what our country is doing and say “No.” We can vote. We can choose a different congress. We can make it clear to the people we elect that we will not stand idly by while they destroy our world and send our children to kill the children of other nations. We can make it clear that we will demand honest elections in this mid term or we will take to the streets and the courts and raise hell.

The pictures defined the war in Vietnam for those of us who remember. It was the pictures that made us realize what was truly happening. A nation said no to Vietnam. Look at the pictures today. Really see them. We can do it again. We can make this set of wars unacceptably expensive to the politicians and the corporations. We can make it clear that we will not support war profiteering. We can support and encourage peace profiteering. We are their workers. We are their market. We can make a difference.

We cannot bring back the broken homes, the dead children. We cannot ease the sorrow our bombs have caused. But we can organize and resist. We can object. We can speak. We can write. We can hand out pamphlets and support anti-war candidates. And we can, by God, VOTE.