hi

i was driving home tonight, and i started thinking about a lot of things we take for granted. i started thinking of the fact that i can go home and be relatively certain that my house will not be bombed by planes dropping munitions from the stratosphere, or run over by bulldozers covered by armor and protected by massively armed soldiers.

i thought of a scene, and maybe you should think of it. it's probably not real. but at the same time it's intensely real, in the sense that it happens to real, living (at least for now), human being like you and me. i thought of a child, playing, in the supreme confidence of his parents telling him all is well, a child occupied with child-thoughts, like, "Is that possible?" or "I bet I can do that". a child bending their head upwards to an odd noise, seeing, in the blue of the sky, black specks becoming visible. a child seeing bombs made in our country, or licensed by our country for other unbelievably poor people to make, coming into view, this bizarre otherness of something appearing in the sky, a place reserved for wonder in this child's eye. i imagine that they continue in their interminable path and eventually explode at the predetermined place, established by central command or bombadier or whoever makes the decision that day, and the force shoves me back, and the shockwave pushes dirt and stones and broken metal and glass and anything else between me and it into my small body. it tears me apart. my body is destroyed by shrapnel from bombs. i don't know why this is happening, or how people will react, or how others will justify it. all i have is a puzzled look at this otherness dropping from the sky, and the pain and surprise of my small body being torn to pieces by immensely destructive weapons, weapons dropped by men who will never see me.

now justify bombing. for gods sake, justify it. the idea that we can do this, we can attack and destroy, like we've done in cuba, the phillipines, iraq, grenada, panama, iran, afghanistan, venezuela, hawaii, the entire contiguous US, the sudan, libya, and anywhere else in the world...it makes me want to kill myself to not be associated with it. i look at my beautiful daughter and think of all the other daughters killed by bombs and artillery and mines and small-arms fire and i want to not exist.

think of who these weapons are dropping on when you cheer the army or air force or navy. think of it. think of the massive de-humanization that needs to be imposed for a man to believe that everyone in a city he is bombing is guilty of what he's being told they're guilty of.

think of it, please. it's being done in your name