The indictment against marines who killed civilians in Haditha (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/15/60minutes/main2574973.shtml) does not include the people responsible for putting young Americans in a situation that caused them to fire without looking and taking innocent lives.
It does not include the deciders that started the war. The President and his team came to office with a grudge against Saddam Hussein and a keen desire to manipulate massive oil fields. They twisted September 11 terror, molded intelligence and threatened venomous attack against anyone who disagreed. They destabilized Iraq without a plan to set it back in place. They ignored history, they ignored intelligence and they ignored the American people. They drove our Armed Forces into a snake pit of people pitted against each other, united only in the desire to rid themselves of American occupiers.
A soldier's primary personal mission is to get home alive. The Haditha marines were ordered into a neighborhood to find enemy soldiers hidden among children. They traveled between buildings that could be homes or bunkers, depending on current occupancy. A remote-triggered IED explodes and takes out one of the marines' vehicles and several of their comrades. Like their fathers, charging into Vietnamese huts, they are invaders in a foreign country facing people they do not understand and knowing the next room could contain an armed enemy. Feel the stress, the confusion, the fear, the terror and...
...put it on the head of the administration that put the soldiers in that street that day. Name the Secretaries of Defense and all of their deputies who have never had a plan for stabilizing Iraq and cannot manage an honorable end to this misbegotten war. These are the parties responsible for the massacre that day, the uncounted innocents killed by our bombs, and a lingering legacy of war resulting from our destabilization of Iraq.
The President needs to be held responsible for this war. Congress needs to investigate the true agendas operating in the drive to war, the special interests that have benefited from the war, and impeach any liars and thieves they find along the way.
The Marines of Haditha will serve long sentences for the mistakes they made that day. The people who are responsible for the war that put them in Haditha that day should be their cellmates.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Clearly Daylight
Yesterday morning, Saturday, I started this rant I want Chanda to pass along to her 8th grade science students. Today, I'm gonna finish it.
Daylight Savings Time merely confirms the undeniable fact that measured time is not natural, but a contrivance imposed on the experience of reality by man. Time passes in nature, morning through the night, as the earth turns and exposes different arcs for sun, moon and stars. Rings grow in trees, layers of geology form, water freezes and melts, rain and heat - the seasons happen naturally.
But it has nothing to do with sixty-second minutes, sixty-minute hours, 24 hour days, 365 day years, decades or even centuries. These are measurements marked off by humans, who are never devoid of profit motives, imposed upon our species and, through us, all the flora and fauna of the world, in order to keep the engines of commerce marching in step.
Most of the elements of our culture - speech, mathematics, music - were developed without the intervention of measured time. The species started marking time just as early - notches to mark the days and years, sundials, rudimentary clocks. It wasn't until the 1880s that Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) set a global standard for time. When clocks were invented, Paris would be clocking a completely different time than Cairo, often minutes apart.
And to tell the truth, few devices are locked into a global time. Look at the iPod or cellphone next to you - does its clock match yours? Walk through the office or your house - are all the clocks reading the same time? Which one is "right"?
So by now you have moved at least one clock in the house to the new time. The computer and cell phone companies pushed their version of time to you, and the devices changed automatically. But it's Sunday morning, and for those of us with the day off, no one is writing any schedule for us. Here's the punchline: they never do. Each makes his own decision when to go, when to slow.
Having thus liberated you from the convention, I warn: an anarchist's ramble about measured time might explain five minutes, but 10 minutes late is late.
Daylight Savings Time merely confirms the undeniable fact that measured time is not natural, but a contrivance imposed on the experience of reality by man. Time passes in nature, morning through the night, as the earth turns and exposes different arcs for sun, moon and stars. Rings grow in trees, layers of geology form, water freezes and melts, rain and heat - the seasons happen naturally.
But it has nothing to do with sixty-second minutes, sixty-minute hours, 24 hour days, 365 day years, decades or even centuries. These are measurements marked off by humans, who are never devoid of profit motives, imposed upon our species and, through us, all the flora and fauna of the world, in order to keep the engines of commerce marching in step.
Most of the elements of our culture - speech, mathematics, music - were developed without the intervention of measured time. The species started marking time just as early - notches to mark the days and years, sundials, rudimentary clocks. It wasn't until the 1880s that Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) set a global standard for time. When clocks were invented, Paris would be clocking a completely different time than Cairo, often minutes apart.
And to tell the truth, few devices are locked into a global time. Look at the iPod or cellphone next to you - does its clock match yours? Walk through the office or your house - are all the clocks reading the same time? Which one is "right"?
So by now you have moved at least one clock in the house to the new time. The computer and cell phone companies pushed their version of time to you, and the devices changed automatically. But it's Sunday morning, and for those of us with the day off, no one is writing any schedule for us. Here's the punchline: they never do. Each makes his own decision when to go, when to slow.
Having thus liberated you from the convention, I warn: an anarchist's ramble about measured time might explain five minutes, but 10 minutes late is late.
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