NP Will Tears Ever Stop?

[Doug Millison]

Will Tears Ever Stop? 
By John Gerassi 

I can't help crying. As soon as I see a person on TV
telling the
heart-rendering story of the tragic fate of their
loved-one in the World
Trade Center disaster, I can't control my tears. But
then I wonder why
didn't I cry when our troops wiped out some 5,000 poor
people in
Panama's El Chorillo neighborhood on the excuse of
looking for Noriega.
Our leaders knew he was hiding elsewhere but we
destroyed El Chorillo
because the folks living there were nationalists who
wanted the U.S. out
of Panama completely.

Worse still, why didn't I cry when we killed two
million Vietnamese,
mostly innocent peasants, in a war which its main
architect, Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara, knew we could not win? When
I went to give
blood the other day, I spotted a Cambodian doing the
same, three up in
the line, and that reminded me: Why didn't I cry when
we helped Pol Pot
butcher another million by giving him arms and money,
because he was
opposed to "our enemy" (who eventually stopped the
killing fields)?

To stay up but not cry that evening, I decided to go
to a movie. I chose
Lumumba, at the Film Forum, and again I realized that
I hadn't cried
when our government arranged for the murder of the
Congo's only decent
leader, to be replaced by General Mobutu, a greedy,
vicious, murdering
dictator. Nor did I cry when the CIA arranged for the
overthrow of
Indonesia's Sukarno, who had fought the Japanese World
War II invaders
and established a free independent country, and then
replaced him by
another General, Suharto, who had collaborated with
the Japanese and who
proceeded to execute at least half a million
"Marxists" (in a country
where, if folks had ever heard of Marx, it was at best
Groucho)?

I watched TV again last night and cried again at the
picture of that
wonderful now-missing father playing with his
two-month old child. Yet
when I remembered the slaughter of thousands of
Salvadorans, so
graphically described in the Times by Ray Bonner, or
the rape and murder
of those American nuns and lay sisters there, all
perpetrated by CIA
trained and paid agents, I never shed a tear. I even
cried when I heard
how brave had been Barbara Olson, wife of the
Solicitor General, whose
political views I detested. But I didn't cry when the
US invaded that
wonderful tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada and killed
innocent citizens
who hoped to get a better life by building a tourist
airfield, which my
government called proof of a Russian base, but then
finished building
once the island was secure in the US camp again.

Why didn't I cry when Ariel Sharon, today Israel's
prime minister,
planned, then ordered, the massacre of two thousand
poor Palestinians in
the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the same
Sharon who, with such
other Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists become prime
ministers as Begin
and Shamir, killed the wives and children of British
officers by blowing
up the King David hotel where they were billeted?

I guess one only cries only for one's own. But is that
a reason to
demand vengeance on anyone who might disagree with us?
That's what
Americans seem to want. Certainly our government oes,
and so too most of
our media. Do we really believe that we have a right
to exploit the poor
folk of the world for our benefit, because we claim we
are free and they
are not?

So now we're going to go to war. We are certainly
entitled to go after
those who killed so many of our innocent brothers and
sisters. And we'll
win, of course. Against Bin Laden. Against Taliban.
Against Iraq.
Against whoever and whatever. In the process we'll
kill a few innocent
children again. Children who have no clothes for the
coming winter. No
houses to shelter them. And no schools to learn why
they are guilty, at
two or four or six years old. Maybe Evangelists
Falwell and Robertson
will claim their death is good because they weren't
Christians, and
maybe some State Department spokesperson will tell the
world that they
were so poor that they're now better off.

And then what? Will we now be able to run the world
the way we want to?
With all the new legislation establishing massive
surveillance of you
and me, our CEOs will certainly be pleased that the
folks demonstrating
against globalization will now be cowed for ever. No
more riots in
Seattle, Quebec or Genoa. Peace at last.

Until next time. Who will it be then? A child grown-up
who survived our
massacre of his innocent parents in El Chorillo? A
Nicaraguan girl who
learned that her doctor mother and father were
murdered by a bunch of
gangsters we called democratic contras who read in the
CIA handbook that
the best way to destroy the only government which was
trying to give the
country's poor a better lot was to kill its teachers,
health personnel,
and government farm workers? Or maybe it will be a
bitter Chilean who is
convinced that his whole family was wiped out on order
of Nixon's
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who could never
tell the difference
between a communist and a democratic socialist or even
a nationalist.

When will we Americans learn that as long as we keep
trying to run the
world for the sake of the bottom line, we will suffer
someone's revenge?
No war will ever stop terrorism as long as we use
terror to have our
way. So I stopped crying because I stopped watching
TV. I went for a
walk. Just four houses from mine. There, a crowd had
congregated to lay
flowers and lit candles in front of our local
firehouse. It was closed.
It had been closed since Tuesday because the firemen,
a wonderful bunch
of friendly guys who always greeted neighborhood folks
with smiles and
good cheer, had rushed so fast to save the victims of
the first tower
that they perished with them when it collapsed. And I
cried again.

So I said to myself when I wrote this, don't send it;
some of your
students, colleagues, neighbors will hate you, maybe
even harm you. But
then I put on the TV again, and there was Secretary of
State Powell
telling me that it will be okay to go to war against
these children,
these poor folks, these US-haters, because we are
civilized and they are
not. So I decided to risk it. Maybe, reading this, one
more person will
ask: Why are so many people in the world ready to die
to give us a taste
of what we give them?

--distributed by Znet

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