We Are All Terrorists

What US Citizens Can Do To Stop Terrorism By James Rothenberg 02/17/05 "Information Clearing House" - - President George says we have to go after the terrorists wherever they are -- find them and sniff them out or something like that. A really big clue to finding them is to follow the money, the money trail, so-called. I want to be a good citizen so I've been doing my own sniffing around. And I think I've found something. Like a lot of other things that at first aren't obvious and then you realize it was right under your nose. And do you know who I found at the start of this trail? You! And me! Every year we send off some of our money to Washington. Half a dollar out of every dollar ends up on the nose of a cruise missile, in the stinking exhaust of a B-2 bomber, in the burning heat of an incendiary napalm-equivalent bomb, in the deformities of the not yet born from toxic depleted uranium payloads, in the blown and rotting, pussy flesh of those we did not intentionally "target" with our smart weapons, paid for with our dumb dollars. And that any honest person will tell you is terrorism, pure and simple, because these weapons don't care who they hit and it is understood in advance that they will inevitably hit the old and the young, the first-borns and the last-borns and everyone in between. Everyone under this sophistication of weaponry will be scared stiff -- shocked and awed in the preferred state terminology. But Washington's terrorism does not count. I mean it really does not count! Because our official state definition of terrorism restricts it to the subnational level. So by our definition the US cannot commit terrorist acts, an interesting reversal of the word's original meaning -- Oxford English Dictionary, "government by intimidation". It's as simple as this: terrorism is what "they" do to "us", not what "we" do to "them". In the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, there are some interesting thoughts about the signers recognizing the equality of all men and certain unalienable rights that they are endowed with, specifically mentioning Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, but it is by no means "self-evident" that this government takes this idea seriously. What kind of a Life does a child born into abject poverty have ahead of it? Maybe one without a roof. How much Liberty do you really have when you haven't enough to eat? And what is the right to pursue Happiness worth to an individual without adequate shelter, clothing, food, and healthcare? Is our government securing these unalienable rights for its people when it spends over half of every dollar of its income on weapons of mass destruction, leaving millions upon millions poor and hungry and without healthcare in this the richest country in the world? Our government is not putting its money where its mouth is. Its mouth is always on fine words -- democracy, freedom, peace -- but listen to Peter Tosh sing, "but there will be no peace til man gets equal rights and justice", and even here at home we are nowhere near these things. Our government puts its money into militarism, and justifies it by claiming that it will buy our security. Everything points to the contrary. Look at Israel and the ultra security-state it has become, increasingly becoming less and less secure. Security is an interaction, depending not solely upon what one side does, but on the mutuality of opposing sides. It can't be bought and it can't be bludgeoned. Americans have been frightened into uncritical acceptance of our country's aggressive, militaristic agenda. We were frightened by the looming, Soviet menace for decades. Now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and declassified documents, we learn that the threat was intentionally exaggerated to provide support from the home population for our further military buildup. Now the threat is terrorism, international terrorism, Islamic terrorism, again intentionally exaggerated for the usual state purposes. How much safer the world, including us, would be if we began to lay down our weapons! And got our military out of everyone's country! How much safer and better the lives of our own people would be if we put our nation's wealth to those very same ideals that the crafters of the Declaration of Independence thought self-evident!

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