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Having grown up surrounded by pro-life activists who make it a habit of protesting with picket signs that have very graphically grotesque images of dead babies on them, it takes an awful lot to make me physically ill, in the shocking gore department. The picketers use the images to drive the point home that it's children dying horrible, painful deaths. It's effective sometimes; sometimes people who see the images get mad at the protesters instead; often there's no impact at all. The pictures I saw today, no matter how jaded I've become when it comes to gory abortion-related mutilated dead-baby photographs, were a professional kick in the stomach with a steel-toed boot worn by a 300-lb Marine.
What's happening to children, and to civilian adults, *RIGHT NOW* while I'm here sitting around fucking with HTML and chainsmoking and complaining about feeling sick over it, is documented photographically and displayed on the Al Jazeera website. Is, no doubt, on the news over there.
These are the things that are happening to the Iraqi people. The people who are not the government. The people who are not the military. The people who are not Saddam Hussein. And they're getting fed images of it, daily. They get to see what our Coalition is doing to *their children*, while we the 'Coalition's public' have no fucking idea. People here, in the United States, wonder why they don't welcome our invading troops! I've heard people I *know* to be compassionate, loving, giving people - I've heard them calling the Iraqis ungrateful, seen them livid over the fact that 'our soldiers are just trying to help them, and this is the thanks they get! Being blown up!'
Our Corporate Media SUCKS. It sucks big hairy purple yak testicles. It tells us almost nothing, and what it /does/ tell us is *wrong*. We're not getting, as a people, the information we need to understand exactly how fucking awful it is over there. What we're getting is propaganda, what we're getting are human interest stories about the families of American soldiers who are in Iraq, what we're getting are photos of ruggedly handsome soldiers carrying sick children with concern written all over their All-American Heroically Grimacing Into The Wind faces.
Their dictator may be wretched, frightening, terrible - he may only be wretched, frightening, and terrible to *some* of them, just as America's current president is to the some of the people of America. But what the people of Iraq are seeing is not the lot of us liberating them from horrors untold, it is the lot of us invading them violently. They rightly see us as the cause of the deaths of their loved ones, their friends, their babies - it doesn't matter who our soldiers are told to shoot, because they shouldn't be there in the first place.
DAMN YOU, Coalition Architects, for sending our youth away to butcher and mutilate Iraq's, and be, in turn, butchered and mutilated. DAMN YOU for suppressing the truth, for keeping what we're doing to their little kids from us - and for suggesting that this is on purpose, that this is a tactic being deployed specifically and methodically by Hussein, that the military is using civilians as cover. It's a goddamn CITY. What do you fucking well expect? People LIVE in cities. DAMN YOU for caring even less for the sanctity of life and the well-being of humanity than your current archnemesis, and for /making this happen/. It's not even *letting* it happen, it's *making* it happen.
And FUCK you for making me feel so completely and utterly powerless.
What's happening to children, and to civilian adults, *RIGHT NOW* while I'm here sitting around fucking with HTML and chainsmoking and complaining about feeling sick over it, is documented photographically and displayed on the Al Jazeera website. Is, no doubt, on the news over there.
These are the things that are happening to the Iraqi people. The people who are not the government. The people who are not the military. The people who are not Saddam Hussein. And they're getting fed images of it, daily. They get to see what our Coalition is doing to *their children*, while we the 'Coalition's public' have no fucking idea. People here, in the United States, wonder why they don't welcome our invading troops! I've heard people I *know* to be compassionate, loving, giving people - I've heard them calling the Iraqis ungrateful, seen them livid over the fact that 'our soldiers are just trying to help them, and this is the thanks they get! Being blown up!'
Our Corporate Media SUCKS. It sucks big hairy purple yak testicles. It tells us almost nothing, and what it /does/ tell us is *wrong*. We're not getting, as a people, the information we need to understand exactly how fucking awful it is over there. What we're getting is propaganda, what we're getting are human interest stories about the families of American soldiers who are in Iraq, what we're getting are photos of ruggedly handsome soldiers carrying sick children with concern written all over their All-American Heroically Grimacing Into The Wind faces.
Their dictator may be wretched, frightening, terrible - he may only be wretched, frightening, and terrible to *some* of them, just as America's current president is to the some of the people of America. But what the people of Iraq are seeing is not the lot of us liberating them from horrors untold, it is the lot of us invading them violently. They rightly see us as the cause of the deaths of their loved ones, their friends, their babies - it doesn't matter who our soldiers are told to shoot, because they shouldn't be there in the first place.
DAMN YOU, Coalition Architects, for sending our youth away to butcher and mutilate Iraq's, and be, in turn, butchered and mutilated. DAMN YOU for suppressing the truth, for keeping what we're doing to their little kids from us - and for suggesting that this is on purpose, that this is a tactic being deployed specifically and methodically by Hussein, that the military is using civilians as cover. It's a goddamn CITY. What do you fucking well expect? People LIVE in cities. DAMN YOU for caring even less for the sanctity of life and the well-being of humanity than your current archnemesis, and for /making this happen/. It's not even *letting* it happen, it's *making* it happen.
And FUCK you for making me feel so completely and utterly powerless.
