Attention Armchair Activists:

"....Blood, blood. I feel covered with the sticky stuff. The streets of Iraq are wet with blood. Skulls are crushed. Limbs shredded. Brains smeared onto walls. The screams of the dying, of the maimed are ricocheting down the alleys of Cairo, Riyadh, Jeddah, Mecca, Medina, Teheran, Damascus, Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, Najaf, Amman, Beirut, Nablus, Hebron, Ramallah, Sanaa, Islamabad, Kandahar and Kabul. Are those screams also being heard in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New York, Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle and San Diego? My heart is as heavy as lead. My tax dollar splits open human beings, miraculous beings, whose main offense is location. By a nasty quirk of fate, they sit on the strategic prize, the world's second largest reserve of oil. Iraq, my annual IRS tithe feeds the machines that destroy you. The fruits of my labor, skimmed off by the Pentagon, blasts bits of human flesh into the rubble. How do we retain our humanity if we don't do more than read (or write) about the growing disaster? How do we go beyond the despairing e-mails to friends, the conversations over dinner in which we express our dismay, but do not take the next step into meaningful action? What is meaningful action now? Even if we occasionally go to a march, a protest, a meeting or an independent film, surely this is not enough as the US military/government becomes ever more out-of-control, ever more vicious. How do we express our outrage inside an electoral system that has spawned John Kerry, a Democratic imperialist who now out does Bush in terms of "stay the course" and "send in more troops" rhetoric? Isn't it time for men and women of decency to say no more business as usual? ...." Mina Hamilton