While I prefer to start a new year on a positive note, no good beginnings can come to pass without first ending the horror of our occupation in civil war-torn Iraq. This NYT story is a wake-up call for those of you who feel no personal connection to the soldiers, airman, marines, sailors and millions of Iraqis in mortal danger daily. This is the story of a soldier who wrote a journal for his infant son in case he didn't come back from Iraq.
If you know no one that serves in the military, certainly you do have family; sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, parents. The people that serve are all of those family members. Click through the 3000 dead faces of war. There is a slaughter and a virtual holocaust going on in Iraq. There is a full-blown holocaust ongoing in Darfur, but while the American public has virtually ignored that tragedy, we didn't create it. We made Iraq. Drawing from Charles Monroe's journal to his son. Watch the multimedia of the journal.
Please for the love of all that is good and honorable about Americans, make your New Year's resolution to do what you can to participate in ending the US participation in Iraq. Contact your Senators and Congress. Insist they cut funding and bring our troops home now. When are enough dead bodies enough? 3000 and counting.
[H/T to Meta for the NYT link]
4 comments:
What a tragedy. This especially:
He finished it when he came home on a two-week leave in August to meet Jordan, then 5 months old. He was so intoxicated by love for his son that he barely slept, instead keeping vigil over the baby.
We won't have a truly happy new year while this obscenity is still going on. Even if the US withdraws its troops in 2007, we will still have the eternal blame for the senseless suffering rained down on the Iraqis.
Perhaps we can have, if not a happy new year, at least a just new year, the year we see Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al in the dock at the Hague.
From your lips to God's ears Op. If there is no punishment for the criminal administration that precipitated this horror, my faith will be seriously shaken.
Hope - thank you for this moving post. As a parent, it cut me to the core - I simply cannot imagine the depth of the sadness this family is experiencing; it has to be bottomless.
I echo op99's wish for justice in 2007, or at least that we begin to cut a significant path of justice and accountability through the thicket of injustice and criminal acts and constitutional breakdown.
We have to set this ocuntry back on the right course, and we have to take the necessary steps to safeguard the democracy.
Here's to peace and justice to come; I just wish there were something that could make right the terrible losses so many have already suffered, and which may never be healed.
Hi Hope,
Thanks for the update. Let's hope that 2007 is a better year for those in danger than 2006 was.
Happy New Year.
Post a Comment