Saturday, November 10, 2012

Is This Child Dead Enough for You? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Is This Child Dead Enough for You? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

I felt like this article bore sharing on this site. I have been deeply troubled over the last few days at the victory celebrations I have witnessed, in people I know and respect, celebrating the re-election of Barack Obama. People who should know better but are either deluded by the smoke and mirrors of the American political scene, or else persist in subscribing to this perverse "lesser evilism" that has us all descending into a moral hellhole. These are dark times. When will we say that enough is enough? When will we agree that killing children is actually wrong, and that no amount of military might or flash rhetoric can make it right?

In conversation this evening someone mentioned to me the endearing photographs of Obama taken with children during his campaign. Now, on the Counterpunch site, I see the other side of the story. The child who has been killed at Mr. Obama's command. There is no celebration, there is no victory. There is no endearment, only a sick reality where children are valued only as cute or endearing subjects of the propaganda machine or tossed aside as useless chattel.

We don't need this grotesquery. The slick and sleazy campaign. The president with his noble face and his noble rhetoric and his kill lists. The endless security and the manufacturing of fear in order to pursue the eternal and infinitely perverse securitization of the world. The time has come to announce a simple and powerful truth. We are not afraid. We are not afraid of the world. We are not afraid of terrorists, we are not afraid of jihad or of economic ruin, we are not afraid of the media, or the powerful speakers, or the security cameras or the drones. We are not afraid of the financial elite or the power they command. We are not afraid of children. We are not afraid of human relationships.

We can learn this, the art of being unafraid. Collectively we can take up our common humanity and cast off the yoke of oppression, of surveillance and fear and mistrust. We don't need to hand up power to weak-minded foolish puppets whose idea of managing the affairs of the world is to fill the banks with money, the skies with death planes, and the streets with the wretched poor. 

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