pacifism

[Doug Millison]

Rich, it's the Bush Administration that is trying to
fight a war, not me. I'm working as hard as I can to
stop it from happening.

Pacifism may not be an option for you, agreed.  But I
doubt you speak for every person who may have to make
a choice about killing.  The U.S. a long history of
accepting conscientious objection to war, although
it's true that levels of tolerance have varied.

This "war" that the Administration is launching
differs in many ways from the Vietnam situation, of
course.  But many things stay the same.  Multinational
corporations with shareholders in the U.S. will profit
from the bloodshed and destruction.  People too old or
otherwise unwilling to fight will send younger people
to do the killing and dying in their places. A huge
fraction of the U.S. population will call
"unpatriotic" (and worse) the people who oppose the
war.  If the Administration manages to push the war to
the point of body bags coming home in significant
numbers, and if the evening news shows enough burning
villages, babies, old folks, most Americans will,
finally, get sick of the senseless violence being
carried out in their name, and will put a stop to it,
as they did in Vietnam.

There are many other parallels, of course, chief among
them the U.S. unwillingness to accept responsibility
for its part in creating war in the first place, and
its insistence on claiming it's killing of the
innocent is justified and the other side's isn't --
rationalizations that will extend to the terrorism of
our coalition partners in return for their support of
U.S. actions, the way the U.S. has always politely
ignored the violence that crminal governments have
inflicted on their neighbors and their own populations
as long as those governments pledge support to U.S.
policies.

Despite the forces arrayed against peace, for me the
only choice is to work for peace and justice, to urge
others to do the same, to practice non-violence in my
own life.  I refuse to give in to despair.


-Doug


--- Richard Romeo <richardromeo at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Doug--
> 
> No hate/war monger me but it seems you are trying to
> fight the Vietnam War 
> all over again-[...]

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