At our local protest today and vigil.....

[Mari333]

a man walked by all the soldiers faces we have posted who died, and also walked by my stepsons pic, which I hold at every vigil, and said "Who are those guys?"
I said "The men and women who are our soldiers who died in Iraq"
He looked confused and then said "well, we had to..those people attacked us on 9/11"
we told him the truth . We put it simply to him.
He looked surprised and said
"Gee maybe I better look into this even more ma'am".
Well, thats something.
I am still amazed that so many of the citizenry still think Iraq and Saddam have ANYTHING to do with 9/11.
Jeezus F Krist!
PS the snow is now 2 feet deep. I took a cab to town.
F*ck driving.

[MoonAndSun]

1. Mari333, this story just makes me want to explode. Why do we still

have so many ignorant people in this country? Is it because they are too damned busy watching the Hilton sisters or any of those other stupid reality shows.

And thank you for being strong and brave.

[joycep]

2. God bless all the people who have stood in the rain and cold, etc. to

try to get the message out.

[Kolesar]

3. Half of NPR listeners had at least one major fact wrong about the war

Either the link of 9/11 to Saddam, WMDs being used on troops, and one other issue. The lying message machine did work.

[zbdent]

4. Hard to educate the public when the public schools, libraries, etc

are being phased out due to "lack of funding" since all of those "rich people" who have jobs are "paying their taxes" like any good patriotic American.

In Akron Ohio, there's kind of a weird situation with the libraries (a good source of finding old newspaper articles, out-of-print books, books you can't or won't be able to buy in the megabookstores).

A few years back (during the Clinton good years), the county passed a levy to help fund a new main branch building. Now, the voters shot down an operations levy, designed to actually help pay the salaries of those who work there. These are exclusive of each other, you can't use the funds from one to pay for the other.

Now, Akron will have a beautiful, modern building housing all the books and resource materials (which students, along with job-seekers and generally interested people can use) which may, in the not too distant future, be used solely as a warehouse locked up away from the public.

[Devlzown]

5. There's still a lot of that.

Americans tend to view Arabs collectively rather than inhabitants of different countries. If Czechs had flown the planes on 9/11, Americans wouldn't have blamed all Europeans for the attacks, but a lot of Americans did either consciously or subconsciously blame all Arabs for attacks that were largely carried out by Saudis. The government and the media encouraged people to believe there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but they aren't totally at fault. They just exploited prejudices that were already there in the minds of many Americans.