disarm the world

Stopwar

Coexist

i just spent my lunch break writing quite a long post about how the war in israel/palestine should stop and it was deleted. sigh. 

anyway. here are two pictures from my trip to tel aviv a year and a half ago that show that many of the youth in israel do not support their army though they are forced to join it for several years of their youth and fight a useless neverending war that will never be won. 

basically, what i want to say is this: my grandparents were in concentration camps and my great grandparents were brutally tortured and murdered because of their religion. that should teach me, of all people, the value of fairness, the value of peace and pacifism and the value in ending worldly conflict that has roots in no real solutions, only more pain and suffering not only for the people any of us are at war with, but for ourselves and our families. that should teach me to rise above hatred and stupidity and blindness to find what's real: that we are all connected, we are all the same, we're all beautiful and stupid and selfish and human.

i don't believe in romanticized homelands. i don't believe in nationalism. politicians are liars. what are you trying to control? i don't believe in fake wars that have nothing to do with things they purport to be about. we are all from africa. before that, stardust.  

what a waste of stardust.

Comments

[hyuodeis]

Thanks. Moved to the favorites.

[nik]

thanks for your comment, i always love a good dialogue.
i hate to be the bearer of bad news, lightfoot, but your liberal concepts have already been lost. your beloved country attacked iraq (one whose leader it propped up and supported for its own selfish reasons) for oil and lied to world, claiming it was because iraq had fabled "WMDs". they murdered thousands of people, including your own citizens, who are forced to join the military as a way out of crippling poverty and nihilistic ghettos created by conservative non-humanistic policies that work to make the very rich slightly richer (ie haliburton). these things make me sad.
american jingoism is exactly an example of the kind of thing i'm writing about above - it's the sort of short-sighted danger that encourages people to rally for war that they have no understanding of. i wonder, if the american public had truly considered the price to be paid for their oil war (that price being their own sons), would they have agreed?
then again, i don't think that many of you did agree - bush's government really didn't care much for what the people had to say... if it did, they would have submitted to the fact that the guy wasn't elected in the first place.

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/list.php

[Lightfoot Letters]

Good post. Great points. However you do not consider the alternatives. As bad as some modern institution are today, they are better than the alternative. That is a return to raw nature. The law of the jungle. Survival of the fittest. The overwhelming power of dictators and war lords. The world that would be created by emperors and national socialists to destroy all human rights that were were denied your grand parents. The liberal concepts found in the US Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights could be lost overnight if those who value those concepts do not fight for those same concepts.