Memorial Day Weekend

June 3rd, 2004

At 76, this was the hardest Memorial Day weekend I have ever experienced. In most of the others along with most Americans I played. This time I was mesmerized by Gary Trudeau’s Sunday Doonesbury cartoon listing the names of the dead, the pictures on Sixty Minutes of those killed in Iraq, the endless interviews and remembrances of the World War II vets—my war, the last “good war-–and the difference between that war and the Iraq war.

The tears have not stopped flowing. I listened to President Bush at various events with a mixture of grief and anger. Here is a man who led us into the greatest disaster our nation has endured since the Civil War, who has killed and will kill untold numbers of people, soldiers and civilians, in Iraq. Here is a man who shamelessly lied and continues to lie about the need to go into Iraq, the justification for doing so----first WMD, now “democracy and freedom” for the Iraqi people—and the administration of the effort. Here is a man without heart who can blandly praise the sacrifices of our troops and the cause, whatever that is, in which they serve without acknowledging his role in getting them killed. He equates patriotism with support of the war, by which he means support of George W. Bush. He disregarded his own father’s advice to not stay in Iraqi. To say he did so by reason of stupidity is to give him the large benefit of the doubt. The other side of the doubt is to believe that he ordered the attack on Iraq out of pique, out of the interest of his corporate friends, out of revenge for the attempt to assassinate his father or by the simple desire to show himself as the leader of the world.

It is foolish and wrong to depreciate the service of our troops. Their role, like the Light Brigade, was to do or die, not to reason why. Their bravery and dedication to duty cannot be doubted. Almost all of them did their best without shame. The shame rests on the chain of command. It does not stop at the walls of the prison but runs right up to the Coalition High Command and on through the walls of the Pentagon and the Oval Office. No investigations are necessary to prove the obvious. Did no one read the International Red Cross’s reports on prisoner torture? Nonsense. Of course they did.

Recently, members of the school board on which I serve have been attacked in the local press for financial irregularities of the administration which, as a matter of fact, were certainly sloppy but clearly not criminal. My defense, along with some of my colleagues, is that as we didn’t know and couldn’t know about these irregularities, we should not be held responsible. But my conscience is trouble by the idea that these things happened on my watch.

No such conscience seems to trouble Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the rest of that gang, although their culpability is obviously greater than my board’s both from the standpoint of what was involved and the degree of knowledge they all had. Nobody says it happened on my watch and takes responsibility. Nobody says that even if he or she was misled by poor information, the responsibility to insure that better information was available was their’s.

We now find ourselves hated by billions of people, not only in Moslem countries, but throughout the world. It is as if even Tonto deserted the Lone Ranger when the Ranger was stupid enough to go it alone, get lots of innocent people killed and make disparaging remarks about Indians in the process. Even playing Hearts or Chess on line has become near impossible because of the constant barrage one is subject to once players outside the United States discover I am an American. There is no explaining that not all Americans support the war or Bush. To be an American is to be an arrogant, war mongering, mass murderer to most of these people and there is no reasoning them out of this view.

Surely there will be future events in this country similar to 9/11 and likely much worse. When we suffered 9/11, we had most of the world’s sympathy and support. We don’t now. Had the 87 billion dollars and still counting spent on the war been spent on defense against terrorism and homeland security, we would be a lot safer today and we would have created a lot fewer enemies from whom fewer terrorists could be bred. Instead, the very survival of our nation, our democracy and our freedom is at stake.

The message of this Memorial Day Weekend is clear. We should all pray to the God of our choice that He will not wreak on us our just deserts as a nation and that He will damn George W. Bush and his cronies to the hell they deserve.