“This is our country’s calling. It’s our country’s destiny.” (George Bush, Memorial Day, 2007, speaking about his war)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1716)
“Good-bye America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.” (Cindy Sheehan, Memorial Day, 2007)
Cindy Sheehan is my friend and my inspiration. When she sent her soul-baring resignation to me, I responded and we exchanged a flurry of e-mails. And I cried. I cried for her, for Casey, for my nephew Chase, for all our troops who have been betrayed, for Iraq, and for the people here at home whose pursuit of happiness has become a trail of tears because of a lie-based war, i.e., the Bush Doctrine.
George Bush is not my president and he doesn’t represent my values. War is not our destiny and it certainly wasn’t Bush’s when he was AWOL from Alabama during the Viet Nam Conflict. In November, a demand was shouted “from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans, white with foam.” This enormous vote against Bush’s legacy provided hope. Idealistic then, we now realize that we spoke to sealed minds, deceived by those we trusted to act on our behalf. We can no longer deny the truth of what we have lost in this sinkhole that is not a democracy, but both a corporatocracy and a kakistocracy. Even our places of worship are big businesses, mega-churches with mammoth television screens, mounted high for those who don’t have front-row seats to the pleas for donations and the laying on of hands.
Cindy Sheehan ended her resignation letter from the peace movement with the challenge that the future of this country is up to us. By matching her courage with our own, we can show Team Neocon, which includes Congress, that war is neither our “calling” nor our “destiny,” despite what the worst president in history would have us believe. Change is on the lips and in the hearts of the people throughout this land who recognize:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. (The Declaration of Independence)
Let us expand on the Bush & Co. claim that the “defining challenge of our generation is the jihadist threat” by recognizing that our conquest-oriented foreign policy has given birth and inspiration to this threat.
Let us abandon a foreign policy that pours money into the bank accounts of those (and their cronies) in the highest offices of our country while spilling the blood of our troops into the sand and soil of target lands whose resources Corporate America covets as it devastates and decimates the population of those places we invade and occupy.
Let us dissolve the political bandits who make pre-election promises but fail to keep them once sworn into power.
Let us establish a party representative of the people.
Let us take up the baton from Cindy Sheehan who will be immortalized as one of the world’s great humanitarians while the Administration of George Bush, a cog in the wheel of a failed machine, will be judged an epic failure.
So, Cindy, retire in peace. And then reemerge, energized. You, my dear friend, will have the support of all who believe that our voices must never be silenced. We can unite to alter and abolish a form of government which has a history of repeated injuries. Return, roaring. We’ll roar with you. In numbers too big to ignore.
