Recently I commented within a post by Charleyon my feelings of guilt and wonder at how I and others can tolerate an ongoing war – with ongoing deaths of our young soldiers and others – that was sold fraudulently to the people, the Congress and the world.
Courtney Martin has a compelling piece in The American Prospect titled The Missing Measure of Our Outrage: If most of us can agree the Iraq War is a colossal failure, why aren't we doing much about it?” I suggest, however, that you read the same piece at CommonDreams.org because there are far more comments there.
Excerpts:
Why haven’t we been more outraged? And if we have, why hasn’t it manifested in desperate action?
We are all, every last American, responsible for this messy war. We must demand a new moral accountability from ourselves that transcends self-interest. If we are truly principled, it shouldn’t matter whether the death toll is 1 or 100,000, whether we know someone directly affected by war or not. We must take the war personally simply by virtue of being American, and even more radically, simply by virtue of being human. And last but certainly not least, we must find a way to move, to act, to affect change.
But American civilians are no closer to understanding how to harness our own outrage, how to live in a modern world where poor kids die while rich kids fight ever harder to get into Harvard, how to go to bed with a peaceful sense that we have done what we could to end war. We remain angry and inert, privileged and distanced, a nation of living rooms loud with debate and proverbial streets empty and silent
Excerpts from commenters:
. If they showed rallies, and Sit-ins things would change
Voting is a waste of time given the choices and the level of corruption. We don’t have the numbers for an effective national strike. We are a nation of slaves rightfully afraid of destitution. We need a revolution but it isn’t happening anytime soon. The only thing that will save us is a total economic collapse that will outrage people to the point of re-organizing our society along very different lines.
Just about every person to whom I have spoken does not know what to do. 69% of Americans polled are against the war and don’t know what to do. They fear being thrown in jail if they protest; a reasonable fear intensified by the lock-up programs on MSNBC that scare the hell out of any law abiding citizen. Many of my friends are afraid to blog or say much in email lest they be targeted.
America bought into the lies, and America doesn’t know how to admit it now. Egos. That’s why more people won’t work hard enough to stop it.
