I am going to borrow from George McGovern and paraphrase his remarks about Vietnam and turn them now to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Uganda. I have taken the frame of what he said and have expanded upon it just as the architects of destruction have taken the Vietnam plan and expanded upon it. An escalation in murderous action, after all, requires an escalation in opposition to it – if one is to preserve one’s spirit.
Every Senator, Representative and Citizen in the United States is partly responsible for sending more than 6,230 young Americans to an early grave in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Senator Chamber, the House of Representatives and the Oval Office of the White House reeks of blood. Every Senator, Representative and the President is partly responsible for the human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land – totally more than 35,000 - young men and women without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.
There are not many of these children who think this war is glorious anymore or who feel that war as a means of spreading democracy is reasonable. Go and sit at their bedsides or talk to their parents and friends about or national honor, courage, voting rights in Afghanistan, abortion clinics in Pakistan or the price of land contracts for oil fields in Iraq. It does not take any courage at all for a Representative, Senator or the President to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Afghanistan, Iraq, bombing Libya and invading Uganda because it is not their blood that is being spilled. It is not their bodies that are being blasted. It is not their families that are being torn asunder. It is not their lives that are being blown apart. But they are responsible for those young men and women, their lives and their hopes. If they do not end these damnable wars these young men and women, like tens of millions of Americans today and nearly one billion people around the world will curse them and all the people of the United States for our pitiful weakness in allowing the Executive Branch of the United States to take for itself like a thief in the night the responsibility of waging war that the Constitution places on our elected representatives.
Please keep that in mind even if you decide to do nothing now. Keep these words in mind and the lives lost and the opportunities missed and the destruction of our way of life and undermining of our beliefs as elections draw near. These sitting Senators and Representatives and this sitting President – all of them – they need to be set aside so we can begin again. They need to be set aside so we can live in peace and prosperity. The United States of America is not the crime ridden, drug soaked, greedy, murderous, killing machine that the current President and members of the Congress have turned it into.
Let them be retired and put aside to do something else with their lives and they can watch as we make a new and excellent nation. Let them be put aside before they lay waste to yet another nation – to yet another generation – to yet another world.
It is all up to you.
Will you let them take even one more life?
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