Destruction and Death. Destruction and Death. And unending war.
I firmly believe that if the Palestinians had taken up non-violent action when they were first ejected from their homes -- if, instead of taking up the gun, they had laid down in front of the tanks, even allowing themselves to die rather than take the lives of others, there would now be a Palestinian independent country, negotiating such issues as water rights and property rights with an Israeli government. There would have been an independent Palestinian government that would now be about 40 years old, almost as old as Israel.
The insistance by Palestinian leaders that their only option was violence has doomed generations of Palestinians to poverty, despair, fear, and death.
Yet, they continue to fight and there is no end in sight.
As difficult as it may be to stay the non-violent course -- to write, to educate, protest and object nonviolently -- we must continue, because the alternative is unending war, global catastrophe, and very possibly the end of human existence. Will future paleontologists be able to figure out what killed our species off? Or will they know? Will there be a written history that will tell them how we managed to destroy ourselves?
Over the past six-and-a-half years, in American after American, what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the angels of their better natures" have awakened. We now have 70% of the American public thinking as we do on the Iraq War, yet in 2003 we were a vilified minority of just 15 or 20%. Things have changed. And if we keep doing what we're doing to the best of our ability, things will continue to change.
I do not ever want to turn on the tv and find out that the funeral for GWB or Cheney is going to be broadcast worldwide, horse-drawn casson and all. No. Let their funerals be as insignificant as Richard Nixon's. Or even less so.
At the same time, if Cheney and GWB try to institute their continuous governance by manufacturing a national emergency before the next president can take office, we must be prepared to lay down our lives. We must shut down every city in the U.S. with prone bodies filling the streets. We must be prepared to die under the wheels of a Rumsfeldian Humvee because only by sacrificing ourselves can we save our children and grandchildren from a home-grown Stalinism made far worse by the power of contemporary electronic media. 1984 was a picnic compared to what the Neo-Con cabal would like to give us.
Instead of fantasizing about assassination plots, we must begin to seriously plan for non-violent self-sacrifice. That is what takes real courage. That is what makes lasting change.
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