CRYING TIME

I'm crying now. I can't go on anymore, stuffing the feelings inside, without finally letting the tears come. The suffering of the mothers, the children, the fathers, the old men in beards, the grandmothers, has gotten to me.

Eleven hundred dead and four hundred of them children. Thousands injured. 1.5 million in emotional trauma. Lives cut ever so short, and for what? Canadian Michel Chossudovsky writes that it is about natural gas just off the coast of Gaza.

There is talk of a ceasefire now. Bush and Olmert work it all out in advance and run the carnage right up to George W.'s last days in office. Then they pull the double-switch right as Obama comes in office, saying they've worked out a plan to bring in NATO to monitor the tunnels where guns and food are smuggled into Gaza. The war-never-ends-crowd gets what they want - move NATO into a new conflict zone making the U.N. irrelevant. The fact that U.N. schools and food distributions centers were bombed in recent days is a key part of the message. NATO is to be the big dog now. Obama's "team" of Hillary and Gen. Jones (the former commander of NATO) are consulted and they of course agree to the package. It's all wrapped up nice and pretty. It's printed in the New York Times which makes it official - by all standards.

I've seen this script before. As I said to the 30 folks crowded into our kitchen last night, who came to hear Molly Little's moving presentation about her three months living with the Palestinian people in a small town completely surrounded by the WALL, this reminds me of the Sioux living on the reservations in South Dakota in the 1860's. They were a beaten people who had their land and culture stolen from them and when they dared to fight back they were called savages, renegades, and devils. The glorious American cavalry had come to bring them Christianity, peace, freedom, civilization, small-pox contaminated blankets, alcohol, hot bullets from repeating rifles, bursting cannon balls, sharpened tips of silver swords, and treaties written in disappearing ink. Anyone who spoke in favor of the redskins were considered devilish as well. So what if their sacred Black Hills were stolen from them. They got "progress" in return. What can be better than that?

Oh god, if you do exist and I am not so sure you do, let me be a devil. Let my heart and soul be with those Pales-Indians. Let me stand with the people always. Let the silence end. Amen.