Bush = Death. That is the Bush Junta's entire legacy. Death--and greed.

Peace Patriot

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Sat Dec-30-06 11:00 AM
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Bush = Death. That is the Bush Junta's entire legacy. Death--and greed.

We hunger for images of life and goodness--

for the street child in Venezuela who now has plump cheeks and a good life and has been trained as a classical musician,

for the citizens of Oaxaca--teachers, small farmers, community leaders, elders--many of them indigenous--who peacefully formed their own government to deal with a fascist governor whose paramilitaries were kidnapping, torturing and killing them,

for the people of Bolivia who rose up against Bechtel Corporation, and elected the first indigenous Andes Indian as president of Bolivia, socialist Evo Morales,

for the people of Chile who elected their first woman president who had been tortured by Pinochet--such a triumph over evil,

for the new president of Ecuador, a highly educated young leftist economist, Rafael Correa, who spent time in the mountains in his youth learning the indigenous language,

for the efforts of the OAS, the Carter Center, EU election monitoring groups and local civic groups to achieve transparent elections in South America,

for the courage of Christine Jennings and her supporters in fighting the stolen election in Florida's 13th congressional district, and for the courage and vision of all election reform activists,

for the courage of Lt. Ehren Watada and others in refusing to fight Bush's heinous war, at the cost of their careers,

for the courage of the military JAG lawyers who fought against torture, and tried to uphold the Geneva Conventions, at great cost to their careers,

for all those people who rushed to help the people of New Orleans and the Gulf coast during Katrina, marshaling boats and caravans and food, despite the obstructions of our murderously neglectful government,

for the visionary people who are developing green technology despite lack of funding and government interest,

for courageous environmentalists and scientists everywhere who have cried the alarm on our out-of-whack planetary weather despite efforts to marginalize and silence them,

for the peasant farmers of South Korea, India and South America who led the revolt of third world countries at the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, whose hearts have been broken by loss of their land and who have transformed sorrow into activism and are leading the world to a new and more humane economic policy,

for the bravery and persistence of the Vietnamese woman who put her son on a boat to America after the US war on Vietnam, a poor woman who, when letters stopped coming 20 years later, saved her pennies and paid her airfare to America to find him, and walked the streets of L.A. in flipflops for months looking for him, and found him at last living in an alley behind a restaurant in San Jose, and rescued him from psychosis and homelessness--ah, Moms everywhere, Cindy Sheehan and so many, whose love we need to replicate and extend to all people and all creatures,

we hunger for the hope of love and goodness, in our lives, in our government...

and Bush and his Junta give us the hanging of an old man, his eyes and tongue popping out as he draws his last breath and his neck is broken, his rickety old limbs twitching with death throes...

That is the Bush legacy. Death--and a greed so immense that it rides over human life like a Horseman of the Apocalypse, oblivious of the tens of the thousands of lives crushed under its hooves, a greed borne of the panic of the rich at not having enough power and money to insulate them from death...

Death, Bush. They will always be linked. His mocking of those about to die. His torture, his mass slaughter, his utter callousness and crudeness. He and his Junta have nothing else. Killing people is their only accomplishment.

But at least, in our contemplation of this monstrous legacy--a legacy that has a lineage back to the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the hundreds of thousands of tortured and 'disappeared' people in Latin America with Reagan's direct complicity--we can see what we do not want to be, as individuals and as a country, and perhaps thereby can find the way to achieve something better--something of life and love--as OUR legacy, as who we really are as Americans, or who we wish, with all our hearts, that we could be: honorable people, angels of mercy, agents of progressive change and evolution, worthy of those who founded our nation upon such high ideals, once the hope of humanity.

2006 was a year of sickness, but also of hope. The hanging of Saddam Hussein seems designed to crush out the hope, and return to the sickness of death and greed that has infected our country since the turn of the millennium. I urge us all--and I am urging myself--this New Year, to form an image of hope, to counter this image of death--whatever gives YOU hope, whether a simple image of the hope of a newborn child, which Christmas brings, or the lighted Christmas tree, long both a Christian and Pagan talisman of springtime and the return of the Sun, or one of the images or stories I have mentioned above (there are so many!), or some other personal or political image that ignites your heart with love for humanity, for democracy and for peace and justice.

Form that image, and hold it fast in your mind, in the coming year. Crowd out death and injustice and the Hangman--with your own image of hope and joy. You, and all of us together, have the power to make a better world. We have the power and the goodness to overcome this dark moment. We have the strength and persistence to deal with this Junta and get past it, and compensate for it. We have a legacy of progress that is unparalleled in human history. And we have the courage to live up to that legacy. Form your own image of love and hope and courage--whatever sums it all up for you--and do not let Bush and his Junta and the war profiteering corporate news monopolies--with their insidious imaging and vile political prattle--deprive you of it. Our dreams of peace and justice and goodness--both as individuals, and as a people--will overcome their nightmare. This is the year that American democracy is going to be reborn. This is the year that we are going to rediscover our country, which has never been lost, and has always been there, in the hearts of the great majority of our people. This is the year that it all comes together, for us, and for all the people in the world waiting and hoping and praying for us to restore our great democratic legacy. This is the year in which our individual and collective images of peace on earth begin to work their magic.

Happy New Year to everyone at DU!