My feelings tonight.
Mar. 17th, 2003 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
judecorpThis is a sad night for me. I am completely baffled by the man who stood there, reading the teleprompter to me at 8pm. I wonder to myself if he even believes the words coming out of his mouth, if he honestly thinks his speech writers profess truth in easy-to-pronounce words. I wonder, too, if he fails to see similarities between himself and the man he calls evil, calls an enemy.
Is it a secret that the United States has weapons of mass destruction, or chemical weapons, or biological weapons? Is it not well-known that here in these United States, people are abused by the government, cast aside by fellow citizens, demoralized, treated unfairly? Has it been forgotten that we have used weapons on our own people, that we have led our own into slaughter, that there are people who believe our leader was not elected, is not wanted, is a dictator?
Perhaps I can overlook blatant misrepresentations of the situation, and the exaggeration of some details alongside the sweep-under of others. And maybe I can forget about the way the current government treats the people in the United States, the /majority/ of the people in this country, those not blessed with oil reserves or silly wealth or family "status." But I can not, and I /will/ not, let you lie to my face and the faces of the other people in this country and around the world.
You stand there, and though you cannot pronounce noo-clee-arr you can claim that you stand for peace, that you tried to work with the United Nations on a peaceful resolution. You lying pile of scum. You have spent the last bunch of weeks trying to convince the UN, the American people, and the people in the rest of the world that peace was the wrong answer, even though that's what we were begging for. We begged on the streets, with signs and slogans, with candlelight and prayers, with letters and articles, with meetings and summits and votes and surveys. The United Nations was working for peace, Mr. Bush, but you can't make me believe that you were a part of it. Not for one second.
You made our country a bleak place to live. We were in a handbasket headed straight for the inevitable thanks to a terrible job market and an even worse morale. Our children were being taught to fear dark skin and turbans and beards, taught that pulling people aside in airports because they "looked like terrorists" was just and smart and right. And American. Our unemployment rates are dismal, and funding for our social services is bleaker still. Our shelters, underfunded, are filled to capacity and in some cases beyond capacity, and all you care about is pushing a war to bring stocks up, to keep your pockets padded. You make me sick.
You will send our military to fight your ridiculous obsession, yet you won't use the $70billion you're asking for to pay them a just wage, and you won't use it to take care of the families you'll destroy, and while we're promising Iraqis medicine and food you won't be offering the same promise to our own people. And if you think we believe that you'll use it to rebuild Iraq, well, we'll just ask our 'friends' in Afghanistan about that.
I stood on a street corner last night with my candle, not because I thought it would make a difference to /you/. After all, you'd already made it perfectly clear that you didn't care if any one single person agreed with you, you wanted a war and you were going to make it, even if you /did/ have to confuse Osama Bin Laden with Saddam Hussein and send sheep into a frenzy with warnings of homeland security warnings, high alerts with no details. Ruling a country by fear - that's Hussein's game, isn't that what you've said? So, no, I didn't do it for you, Mr. Bush, because that would have been a waste. I did it for the rest of the world that knows what is good and what is right. And for me.
Last night from 8:00 - 8:15 PM, I felt a calm in my heart and a speck of joy. What a difference 24 hours can make. (Or 48?) Now I feel sick. Disheartened and sad, yes, but mostly I just want to vomit all over your smug little face.
Is it a secret that the United States has weapons of mass destruction, or chemical weapons, or biological weapons? Is it not well-known that here in these United States, people are abused by the government, cast aside by fellow citizens, demoralized, treated unfairly? Has it been forgotten that we have used weapons on our own people, that we have led our own into slaughter, that there are people who believe our leader was not elected, is not wanted, is a dictator?
Perhaps I can overlook blatant misrepresentations of the situation, and the exaggeration of some details alongside the sweep-under of others. And maybe I can forget about the way the current government treats the people in the United States, the /majority/ of the people in this country, those not blessed with oil reserves or silly wealth or family "status." But I can not, and I /will/ not, let you lie to my face and the faces of the other people in this country and around the world.
You stand there, and though you cannot pronounce noo-clee-arr you can claim that you stand for peace, that you tried to work with the United Nations on a peaceful resolution. You lying pile of scum. You have spent the last bunch of weeks trying to convince the UN, the American people, and the people in the rest of the world that peace was the wrong answer, even though that's what we were begging for. We begged on the streets, with signs and slogans, with candlelight and prayers, with letters and articles, with meetings and summits and votes and surveys. The United Nations was working for peace, Mr. Bush, but you can't make me believe that you were a part of it. Not for one second.
You made our country a bleak place to live. We were in a handbasket headed straight for the inevitable thanks to a terrible job market and an even worse morale. Our children were being taught to fear dark skin and turbans and beards, taught that pulling people aside in airports because they "looked like terrorists" was just and smart and right. And American. Our unemployment rates are dismal, and funding for our social services is bleaker still. Our shelters, underfunded, are filled to capacity and in some cases beyond capacity, and all you care about is pushing a war to bring stocks up, to keep your pockets padded. You make me sick.
You will send our military to fight your ridiculous obsession, yet you won't use the $70billion you're asking for to pay them a just wage, and you won't use it to take care of the families you'll destroy, and while we're promising Iraqis medicine and food you won't be offering the same promise to our own people. And if you think we believe that you'll use it to rebuild Iraq, well, we'll just ask our 'friends' in Afghanistan about that.
I stood on a street corner last night with my candle, not because I thought it would make a difference to /you/. After all, you'd already made it perfectly clear that you didn't care if any one single person agreed with you, you wanted a war and you were going to make it, even if you /did/ have to confuse Osama Bin Laden with Saddam Hussein and send sheep into a frenzy with warnings of homeland security warnings, high alerts with no details. Ruling a country by fear - that's Hussein's game, isn't that what you've said? So, no, I didn't do it for you, Mr. Bush, because that would have been a waste. I did it for the rest of the world that knows what is good and what is right. And for me.
Last night from 8:00 - 8:15 PM, I felt a calm in my heart and a speck of joy. What a difference 24 hours can make. (Or 48?) Now I feel sick. Disheartened and sad, yes, but mostly I just want to vomit all over your smug little face.
