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July 20, 2004 This morning I woke up early, barely past mid- night. I always seem to work best and think best when this half of the world is asleep. It has been this way for years. If someone comes-a- knocking at two A.M. I will usually either be awake and having coffee or about to come awake and have coffee. When I get up at four in the morning I think of it as having slept in. Sad but true, it has been this way ever since I was taken away from the work I did to what I do now, which really is much of nothing. For the past few months my un-employed wife and I have been living in a motor home that we drove to a small community in South West Virginia. After all I can be disabled retired and she can be unemployed anywhere and this seems to be as good a place as any and a better place than most. This morning, as is my habit, I read the news of the world. Not much has changed since yesterday, I am still running for office any office as your favorite write-in candidate, and the world is still in pretty rough shape. We are a sorry lot of humanity that are currently occupying the face of the planet. We grew up in America and Russia with the constant threat of the great red Soviet, ready at a moments notice to throw their thousands of ICBMs’ at us and us at them. The Europeans grew up caught in the middle, feeling squeezed between the great powers of the Bear and The Eagle. We all; all of us on every continent and island or atoll, grew up in a world that was losing the blush of freedom from oppression that was so hard fought for and won during the war against the Axis of Japan, Germany and Italy and their allies. What is bothering me so much this early morning is that we have forgotten as a world population the terrible things that happened between nineteen thirty and nineteen fifty four when the Korean conflict was finished in a stalemate. We have forgotten the terror of bombs falling on cities and firestorms like the one that took Dresden Germany out of the war. We have, as a world, forgotten the terrible things men are capable of doing to other men; we looked away from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the only cities in the world to actually receive the nuclear fire from the sky. We have forgotten and rescinded the freedom our fathers and mothers fought and died for. We have again enslaved ourselves with violence and fear of violence. We are captive in our neighborhoods, we are captive in our cities and states and we are captive in our countries because we have forgotten that violence evokes a violent response. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were the exception, not the rule, and they died in part for their belief in non violence. Osama bin Laden feels his violence will defeat the west and the west must of necessity respond in kind. No change in a persons mind ever came from the end of a rifle. The change a bullet brings is only death. If the Imams of the middle east preach from their pulpit that the west is the enemy, what choice will the Muslim have other than to make war in the name of his religion and his nation? What choice will them who are warred against have other than escalating violence? If the Christian preachers of the west hold forth from their pulpit that the Middle East is sacred ground to their religion and must be guarded against desecration by the Muslims so Jesus will come back, what choice will the citizens of those countries have other than to resort to the way of the gun? If the Rabbi preaches from his pulpit that Israel is the land that God gave the Jews and it is their right o disenfranchise them who have lived on it for a millennia or more, what response does the Palestinian three generations in a refugee camp, have other than violence? We have all forgotten, despite the daily reminders painted in the blood of non-combatants, that the response to violence is violence. That if you have a knife I will fight you with a gun, if you have a gun I will get a cannon and if you have a cannon I will respond with a bomb. It is an escalating cycle that leads only to death and dying. There have been few times; I will admit to some, that war has led to freedom from oppression; WWII being the last instance where oppressed people were freed, Freed from Nazi and Japanese occupation of their lands. This war today, this war in Iraq may have made some of us feel better for reasons I will never comprehend but it has not and will not lead to freedom for the Iraqi people, at least not our western concept of freedom where the rights of the individual must be protected. History will not allow it. As soon as possible more Imams like Sadr will rise and communicate from the pulpit the evils of the west and the need for a religious theocracy after the Iranian mold. A theocracy based on a strict interpretation of the Koran We will have used our weapons and spent the lives of our children in Iraq for trading one kind of oppression for another. Yet the oppression we as Americans should be fighting against is right in front of us and our elected officials ignore that risk to our freedom; that oppression being the terror in our own neighborhoods. The violence and threat of violence in cities across the country enslaves the American people to fear. This fear IS our master and our jailer. We have a national congress in Washington D.C. diddling around on a permanent ban on assault weapons because of special interest groups like the National Rifle Association and the contributions and votes that it delivers. Make no mistake about it, assault weapons are weapons of war and these are the weapons that them who war in our neighborhoods prefer. The city my wife and I have temporarily left behind starts with a D and ends with an etroit; beyond that hint I will not name it. It is a violent place where the gun has ruled for most, if not all of my adult life. Second amendment be damned I hate those things. I hate the blood that they spill in the hands of angry people, blood that firefighters use their hoses to wash into the sewer as if that is where it belonged in the first place. I am not against people owning guns and I know that guns are in a category like a mechanics tool but the use of that particular tool is primarily for one thing and one thing only; killing. Kill and eat and animal and I say bon appetite, kill a four year old baby with a stray bullet from a drive by shooting or because some seven year old is playing with a weapon they found in the home and I say weep, weep for the shrug we give the news and weep for the life that will never sing. Just as we should weep for the suicide bomber victims and for the reasons that the suicide bomber thought justified the destruction of humanity. I will get back to the campaign trail tomorrow or the next day, poking fun at them who think they should lead but for today I will feel the sadness that came to me on this early morning while the sky was dark. Peace. ------------ About the author Mark C. Durfee: 49...stopped doing what I was doing before to become an unpublished, unemployed writer. Any interested agent or publisher can contact me at the addy listed. I have four manuscripts complete and two more underway. I am willing to listen to proposals. Email: mcd5255@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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