| my essays: against the blinking green |
| Against the Blinking Green by Evan Greer Copyright Evan Greer, 2003 This morning my TV told me that the war was over. I was a little surprised; I�m used to my daily dose of NBC sounding more like Barry Goldwater than Abbie Hoffman, who bronzed the phrase �The war is over,� in the Vietnam era. The conservative tone never really surprised me, seeing as NBC, along with CBS and Time are owned collectively by General Electric, the corporate energy giant with close ties to the nuclear industry. As the television continued to administer my brain-meds, I realized that the statement was not quite so revolutionary. Somewhere, entangled in a glowing green cross-hair and a waving American flag, augmented by dramatic�or rather, epic�background music, one message spat forth from the screen: �Relax! The war�s over now. We�re all much safer, the Iraqi people are liberated, and didn�t our president and our boys do a great job?� As someone who has fought vehemently against this war from the beginning, risked arrest in civil disobedience, and even was attacked by riot police at Tufts University, you might think that I would be relieved to hear that the war was over. Unfortunately, the very thing that got me into all the trouble in the first place started working again: my brain. In every sense, the war is not over. Most literally, there are still U.S. troops stationed in Iraq (not to mention nearly every other country in the world;) there is still fighting going on there. We still spend more than $1 billion dollars a day on our military. (Not including the $70 billion that Bush is asking from Congress, or the billions in direct military aid that we give to Colombia and Israel.) I have spoken to many people who opposed this war from the beginning, but who are now allowing what they see on TV to turn their minds around. Now that the war is over, the movement is divided. There are those that are simply content to oppose war after war, rejoicing when the war is over and the troops are home and never wondering what caused the war in the first place. This war may be over, but the institutions that created it and allowed it to go forward are still firmly in place. The polls have rebounded; everyone loves Bush and loves the war. (Hey, it�s good for the economy!) There�s one little problem: what about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Iraqi�s who have died? Or the billions of dollars that will be spent rebuilding, while at home our schools are unspeakable under funded. War will always be a failure if it leaves in place�and even encourages�the system that created it in the first place. There is even more reason to protest now: the U.S. just invaded another country, providing weapons of mass destruction as the justification. So far, despite the media�s hype every time some troops find a bag of Miracle Grow in Iraq, the only smoking guns have been those of the soldiers. If Bush and his hawks were so certain that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, one might expect them to have some general idea of where they might be. The question is no longer can we stop this war? But rather, which country will be next? And how many more wars will we have to fight before people realize that�so long as our government is run by our economy, and so long as the economic system in this country relies on the rich profiting from the poor, the wars will never stop. There are plenty of wars raging on that you�re not seeing on TV. Many of them are wars that the United States created by aiding fascist military governments to fight off populist movements that might hurt U.S. trade agreements. If you opposed this war, I call on you to continue to fight the system and the State that wages war on the weakest of the world. Before this war, the polls�not that you can trust them�and the protest numbers clearly showed that a majority of Americans didn�t support military action in Iraq without U.N. support. We went ahead anyway. Even if you now support this war, it�s about time that people get outraged that in this so-called democratic country, our government�the head of which was not elected by popular vote�can take an action that the majority of people in that country don�t want. Is that democracy? This is a dangerous time in America. The patriotism and economic perks that this well-done-pat-on-the-back war will likely create could easily cloak the dark and sinister facts: our democracy is fading. Our civil liberties are nearly gone. We are governed by fear and money. Many people tell me that they feel powerless. They disagree with what is going on, but feel they can�t do a thing about it. If this country were half democracy it claims to be, its people would not feel powerless to effect the actions of its government. There will come a time for all of us when we will feel powerless to affect the actions of our government. That is not the time to give up; it is the time to rise up. |
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