“I don’t walk about belief – whether or not we should have started this war. Rather, I walk because we shouldn’t live our lives as if all is normal. People are suffering every moment because of this war – U.S. Soldiers and their families, Iraqi soldiers and civilians and their families – and this question of what we can do to end this suffering should be with us every day.”
a Concord (MA) area resident – in a letter to the editor regarding her own participation in a public vigil each Friday morning at the town center – ‘We Walk for All Who Suffer Because of War.’
this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters
we honor courage in all its forms
cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.
image and poem below the fold
Relatives hold the coffin of a slain Iraqi policeman on top of a vehicle during a funeral in Baghdad’s Sadr City March 8, 2006. The policeman and a colleague were killed when a roadside bomb went off near their vehicle while on patrol earlier today in central Baghdad, relatives said.
REUTERS/Kareem Raheem
Thierry Wilwerth, left, looks on as a casket containing his son, Army Spc. Thomas J. Wilwerth, is carried at Calverton National Cemetery in Calverton, Tuesday, March 7, 2006 in New York. Wilwerth died in Iraq last month when an improvised bomb exploded near a Bradley armored vehicle he was in.
(AP Photo/Ed Betz)
Excerpts from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
by Claudia Rankine
There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television–if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, or leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.
– – –
put a meaningful magnet on your car or metal filing cabinet
read Ilona’s important new blog – PTSD Combat
view the pbs newshour silent honor roll (with thanks to jimstaro at booman.)
take a private moment to light one candle among many (with thanks to TXSharon)
support Veterans for Peace
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
remember the fallen
support Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors – TAPS
support Gold Star Families for Peace
support the fallen
support the troops
support Iraq Veterans Against the War
support Military families Speak Out
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
witness every day
Click on the candle to copy the image into your own comment (you can leave it on my server), and/or rate this one – not for mojo, but to leave a small mark after taking this moment.
” I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
from Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am honored that Iraq War Grief Daily Witness has been nominated for Best Series for 2005.
Thank you all,
Jerry Soucy aka RubDMC
I am honored to know you through these days of witnessing and I am in constant of awe of you and the people who journey along with you.
You are making a difference. Some days it may not seem so. But you have spurn others onward. You have given faces to the little children as they lie in puddles of the blood of their parents… or of their own.
You have given many the edge to face fears and march.
You may sometimes feel alone, but please know that there are several here and all over who are behind, beside, and with you.
You’ve already won the most important reward. The love, respect and admiration of decent, caring human beings.
“The love, respect and admiration of decent, caring human beings.”
Peace
War is rape and death and destruction. It is the ultimate expression of Power Over, and America’s love affair with war has poisoned our whole culture.
I look at the pictures of this soldier and others from NY regularly. There’s still a sense of disbelief. A sense that their pictures belong somewhere other than a newspaper, buried among the stories of our daily lives as if their deaths are a common accepted thing. And then I wake up.
…and the strength to help bring it to life.
thank you so much. You finally opened my floodgate of tears that have been building all day due to real life tragedies. Your witness is one that I am honored to share. We will bring Peace.
Loneliness finally found me at 57, when my Vietnam veteran friend died. Now I know for sure: We mustn’t inflict it on any more people.
Impeach now.
Light A Candle For
Peace, Tolerance, Understanding
and For The Children – Innocence Lost!
“Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”
— John Locke, 1690
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‘Unitary Executive’ Or Autocracy?
by Paul Waldman, TomPaine.com
The Bush administration has replaced the rule of law with the rule by one.
After the 2000 election, one in which Republicans successfully hijacked the electoral process in Florida to obtain their preferred outcome and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court issued what may have been its most disgraceful decision since Dred Scott, supposedly neutral observers in the media were unanimous in their praise for the smooth operation of the government at all levels. The system worked, they said. There were no tanks in the streets, and the person who had actually won the election did the right thing and gave in. “Maybe the best thing of all,” intoned CNN’s Candy Crowley, “is that the messy feelings at the Florida ballot box have really only proven the strength of democracy.”
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“When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state”
Thomas Jefferson
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Whatever Happened to Courage?
By Charles Sullivan
Why do we tolerate the kind of government we now have? Why do we allow it to rape and plunder the earth that provides the sweet gift of life, and divvy up the profits among the rich? Why do we sit by quietly and allow the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations by the armed forces? Why do we allow our government to fleece the poor by providing eternal welfare to the rich? Why do we allow this government to represent the interest of the wealthy by neglecting the needs of the many?
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“Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that ‘if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.’ It is a very serious consideration…that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.”
Samuel Adams, speech in Boston, 1771
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The Dilemma Of The Last Sovereign
By Zbigniew Brezezinski
America needs to face squarely a centrally important new global reality: that the world’s population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power.
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“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” ?
Winston Churchill
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FOCUS | Dahr Jamail: See Dick Loot
Dahr Jamail writes: It is, of course, no coincidence that the man sitting as vice president played a key role with his influence in obtaining the lion’s share of contracts in Iraq for the company he was CEO of prior to his self-appointed position. The ties that bind Cheney to Halliburton also link him to groups with even broader interests in the Middle East, which are causing civilians on the ground there, as well as in the US, to pay the price.
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Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.
The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell.
The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose–especially their lives.
Eugene Debs : 16 June 1918: The speech was given to about 1,200 people and was later used against Debs to make the case that he had violated the espionage Act. The judge sentenced Debs to ten years in prison:
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Deja Vu All Over Again
The administration’s drumbeat on Iran is rapidly picking up tempo.
By Tim Dickinson National Affairs Daily Rollingstone.com —
Posted Mar 07, 2006 7:04 PM
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And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people
Hannah Arendt, from her book The Origins Of Totalitarianism p.128
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If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say “No” to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.
Louis Lecoin – French pacifist leader
**
“Never again shall one generation of veterans abandon another.”
Visiting Iraqi Women Speak Out In Washington
David Swanson: “We Are Human, Like You”
Wednesday, 8 March 2006, 11:22 am
Opinion: David Swanson
“We Are Human, Like You”
By David Swanson
woolseyforpeace.org
A piece of my heart is always left behind when this senseless death occurs. It started 46 years ago and has not stopped for all these years. The sorrow is so hurtful and the tears sting. I wobble in my gait, when I come in to see more of the darkness of this ugly event once again. Peace is such a comfort. Why is it not ascertainable? I pray for peace daily and always…
Thanks, Dear Jerry, for your mindfulness in reminding us all of what we are giving up when we witness this. Our souls will always become sad when we remember this time in our lives. You are one heck of a man to be here almost every day for us. I applaud you and honor you. You deserve more than awards. I am very sure your star in the galaxy is there awaiting for you to receive. xoxo