Towards a global perspective . . .

About the War on Terror:
How’s this for terrorism. Buried on page 4a of today’s hardcopy Democrat and Chronicle is an article titled “CIA uses missile strikes to guage enemy reaction”. To paraphrase, Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, said that they are using missle strikes to ‘tickle’ the enemy along the Afganistan-Pakistan border. Apparently they are bombing civilian targets to “provoke the enemy” to respond because “in that response, we learn so much.”

So! Now I get it. It’s only an experiment! We have killed over 100 civilians to evaluate the terrorist’s response patterns.
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A group of local IndyMedia people and activists went to the Democratic and Republican Conventions. There was a great deal of violence directed toward protesters, especially at the RNC in St.Paul/Minneapolis. When our representatives arrived safely home, they had video from these events, and some very disturbing stories of violence against activists engaged in legal activities, media people on the streets, and in their homes and against anyone they chose to attack any time, any place they chose to attack them. The images of violence were a vivid reminder of my first experiences in demonstrations while I was in college.

Their stories brought me back to November 1969 in DC. I attended a huge demonstration in Washington DC that fall. I had never been to such an event before, but I wanted to join the movement, and a friend gave me a ride down an back. Unfortunately, he was staying with his family, and didn’t want his family to think he had a girlfriend, so I found myself on the street alone, wandering through the crowds. I was naive, and had no idea what to expect. When I was sprayed with teargas by the police, I was too shocked to be angry or afraid, and after a time, I ended up in the basement of a church where a fellow protester got some water and a cloth, and tried to help me get the coating of chemicals off my face and out of my eyes. The minister offered to put me us up for the night at his home along with some other young men who were alone and had no where to go.
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The upcoming election is getting pretty hairy.   Only a couple of weeks ago, I was planning on voting for Cynthia McKinney to make a statement about the options.  I live in a solid blue state after all, so it is unlikely to affect the outcome of the election.  However, since the Georgia fiasco, the violent repression of dissent AND the PRESS at the RNC, and Sarah Palin coming on line, I have changed my mind.  It’s time to step back from the brink, and so I will have to vote for Obama.

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