Talkin' Bout a Revolution

My partner, G, often reads and critiques my posts before I write them, although sometimes she doesn't have time to read them until after I have posted them. When she read the final quotes from the Rolling Stone article by Matt Tabbai in my piece called Feeling the Pain, she was moved to put her own thoughts into this blog. I therefore give you my guest blogger for the day, and her thoughts on Matt Tabbai's comparison of the VietNam protest and the growing protest against this current conflict:

I read Mary Ellen's piece with interest and was very moved by it. I was bothered, though, by the quoted author's differentiation between the Iraq war protest and the Vietnam War protest. At its heart the protest against the war in Iraq, like the VietNam war protest, is indeed a visionary movement - including a protest against this mad administration's warped world view and global tyranny. It includes opposition to:

• this administration's increasingly-entitled demand for oil;
• its refusal to join the world community's concern for the effects of global warming and other environmental disasters;
• its negligence in promoting conservation of existing resources and in developing renewable energy resources;
• its divisive Bible-thumping, Christianity-pumping offensive against our own Constitution's safegards from religious tyranny;
• its refusal to acknowledge and respect other religions and ideologies;
• its arrogant refusal to acknowledge this country's own role in breeding terrorism across the globe;
• its refusal to work through diplomatic channels and in concert with other nations;
• a promotion of flag-waving militant "patriotism" as a smokescreen for diminishing our own constitutional rights while hypocritically and arrogantly assuming the "right" to impose democracy on another country (after a suitable period of "shock and awe").

When we protest this war, we are also protesting the unconscionable use of our country's military might for the sake of oil, for the protection of profits and corporate greed, a culture based on the doctrine of "more" and "bigger." We believe in working towards a worldview of sustainable community, rather than national dominion.

Those of us who oppose this particular war are also protesting an administration built on governing by silence, secrecy, manipulation, and outright deceptions of the highest magnitude. It doesn't matter to our current leaders what something really is, only what they can call it, and how far-and-wide they can spread their own propoganda - we are opposed to that, believing that we, and the rest of the world, deserve to be told the truth by our leaders. In the current climate of lies and deceptions, our opposition to this war is indeed not only "visionary" but revolutionary. We hope it's a revolution whose time has come.

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