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Robin Rose Bennett |
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PO Box 367, Hewitt NJ
07421 973-728-5878 |
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How to Grow Democracy – 11/16/04 How naïve have we become as a citizenry? How can we possibly accept reports that an entire city, Fallujah, assaulted by the U.S. military, could not be a humanitarian tragedy? Can you dare to imagine 500 lb. bombs dropping on NYC, or Charleston, or Phoenix, or any other city somehow targeting only guilty people?? How is this horrific violence serving us? How is it helping anyone anywhere to appreciate freedom and democracy? We are making a mockery of these words as we destroy people, property, and the earth that sustains all of us. Our mass media is deliberately not doing their job of informing us, the citizens, of what carnage is going on in our names. We need to look to press from outside our own country or the few independent media outlets to get a clearer picture of what is really going on, again, in our names. There are bodies rotting in the streets, men, women, and children are dying. What is going on is tragic and a travesty. If you doubt this, watch and see what will be revealed over the next months. Destroying a country has never yet been known to help it. And even beyond that, do we really need to look further than inside our own hearts to know that what is happening is at terrible odds with everything we are supposed to stand for? Where is our compassion? Our own house is decidedly NOT in order and needs our complete attention. Don’t we need to question the fact that we are shown no visual evidence of American soldiers’ deaths? Doesn’t this seem strange? The press and television are forbidden from showing us the dead bodies of our young women and men, even in their flag-draped coffins. To quote Rumsfeld, “it makes people lose their taste for war.” Yes, please, let’s do lose our taste for war. And since when did the American press take orders from the U.S. military? Are we a free society or not? We are losing everything precious and in order to turn things around, we must be willing to deal in truth, not public relations and media spin. Our economy is in a shambles, people are depressed and frightened, and our international relations are at an all-time low. Information is coming out, slowly but surely, that raises serious questions about whether our own elections were severely tampered with...are we willing to forgo free and fair elections, too, in the name of fighting terrorism? I don’t think so. I know the great majority of American people, especially our children, are sincere and true in their desire for a better world, a world that is more peaceful, just, and where hunger and poverty have been eradicated. This is all still possible, but first, we have to find and reclaim the truths we know in our own hearts. We have to join together and stand up and insist upon pursuing policies that support what we truly believe in and know, not what misleading reports tell us to believe. We have the power, now we have to use it. If we want to grow democracy, freedom, and equality around the world, it is less complicated than all the experts would have us believe. We need to focus on ensuring that people have adequate food, water, clothing, shelter, and the freedom to live and worship as they please. When the majority of the world’s people have these, the few hard-core fanatics who are satisfied by nothing, will have lost their fangs, their power to intimidate and rally others to their cause. Robin Rose Bennett
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