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By Mike Palecek (about the author)
Become a Fan -- Page 3 of 5 page(s)
In "Bystanders" Mickey Z shares with us his sorrow over his mother's death and relates that feeling to the sorrow others feel around the world at the deaths of their loved ones.
He shouldn't have to tell us, but we are remedial readers, special ed. students in the world university. We are Americans. If you tell us over and over again, we might get it. We might some day understand that the death of an Iraqi girl is just as much a tragedy, a loss to the world, as an American life.
We have heard and read the statistics, blah-blah number of children die each minute for lack of blah-blah-blah. But we don't see.
We need to be told again and again. Put it on TV and have girls and Chevrolets and run it past us every day for the next twenty years and we will absorb the meaning like toxins into our skin, unaware that we have received the message, but it will be inside of us.
But do we have twenty years?
I dunno.
We have heard the question, "Why do they hate us?"
Duh, I dunno.
Mickey Z tells us about a Guantanamo prisoner who saw another prisoner beaten to death by American boys and left to lie in his blood and body fluids.
I know that when I first heard about 9/11 my reaction was, good, someone is finally fighting back.
"We give them excellent reason every two seconds and a million more reasons every minute," says Mickey Z.
"As the Indian-born author/activist Arundhati Roy explains."
People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America.
"Native American scholar Ward Churchill takes it further, warning us that the same people Roy refers to have no obligation — moral, ethical, legal or otherwise — to sit on their thumbs while the opposition here dithers about doing anything to change the system."
We should be ashamed to be Americans.
We should hate America.
Become a Fan -- Page 3 of 5 page(s)
He shouldn't have to tell us, but we are remedial readers, special ed. students in the world university. We are Americans. If you tell us over and over again, we might get it. We might some day understand that the death of an Iraqi girl is just as much a tragedy, a loss to the world, as an American life.
We have heard and read the statistics, blah-blah number of children die each minute for lack of blah-blah-blah. But we don't see.
We need to be told again and again. Put it on TV and have girls and Chevrolets and run it past us every day for the next twenty years and we will absorb the meaning like toxins into our skin, unaware that we have received the message, but it will be inside of us.
But do we have twenty years?
I dunno.
We have heard the question, "Why do they hate us?"
Duh, I dunno.
Mickey Z tells us about a Guantanamo prisoner who saw another prisoner beaten to death by American boys and left to lie in his blood and body fluids.
I know that when I first heard about 9/11 my reaction was, good, someone is finally fighting back.
"We give them excellent reason every two seconds and a million more reasons every minute," says Mickey Z.
"As the Indian-born author/activist Arundhati Roy explains."
People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America.
"Native American scholar Ward Churchill takes it further, warning us that the same people Roy refers to have no obligation — moral, ethical, legal or otherwise — to sit on their thumbs while the opposition here dithers about doing anything to change the system."
We should be ashamed to be Americans.
We should hate America.
www.mikepalecek.com
Author, former peace prisoner, journalist, candidate.
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