The Nodding Heads

( reflections from 2003)

by Mark Sashine

OpEdNews.com

              It was in 2003. I was watching Colin Powell   live in the UN Security Council.  About twenty people around me were nodding their heads in approval and admiration.  The media next day was ecstatically bubbling about Mr. Powell’s prowess, sincerity and convincing arguments which earned our plans to attack Iraq an unprecedented support of about 70% of the polled. The score is nearly the same now, a year  and many thousands dead later.

            I was wondering what were those polled people thinking. Maybe they didn’t really care. Or maybe they answered the way they were expected to. After all, that serious, intelligent general of ours was so imperative, so persuasive and so American. Of course  that Saddam fellow with a funny name is guilty of something. It is time to kick his butt, poke his guts, teach him a lesson, take over, roll, shoot, waste, kill, bomb, whatever those brave folks of ours do to other people to protect our interests. I guess that was what they were thinking after a bottle of beer in a bar, not realizing that by that simple poll they had sentenced their own children and themselves to the utter misery and very probable premature death.

The whole secret is in those two words: our interests.   And the dirt in that secret is the fact that the interests of the common citizens of this country are as far away from the interests of the current administration as Iraq is from the US. Mr. Powell didn’t give a damn about the Security Council. That’s why he was not ashamed to come out there as some negligent cop with shallow and concocted pieces of “ evidence”, trying desperately to prove the abomination: that our country has a right to attack another sovereign country just because our president has a grudge against it. He didn’t care about his and our country's’ international reputation; neither did he care for his own image as a statesman. That is because he isn’t the one and neither are the people sitting now in the key positions of power. Mr. Powell was delivering his message to the American people and that message was brief and direct, the way we here like it, “I am going for a kill and you, folks will enjoy watching it on TV. It will be just like a Reality Show.”

By selling that nonsense, Mr. Powell was counting on his knowledge of our people. And how right he was.  We bought it because we deserve him. We deserve the people who will lead us to the Abyss. Step – by- step, they will destroy our life, pollute our air, corrupt our economy and steal our freedoms. And we will praise them for it. Day- by –day, year- by year they will eliminate our youth in perpetual wars, tarnish our conscience with atrocities and condemn our eternal souls to Hell, while we shout patriotic slogans, drink bad beer, pray at the coffins and cry late at night, when no one can see us.  But crying will come later, much later.

            Wars recognize no boundaries; neither do they follow any rationale.  The blood we spill will come back at us.  We will not be able to hide in the midst of ignorance, defend ourselves by our arrogance, make noises that we only followed our leadership, etc. EVERYONE DIES ALONE!  If only those prophetic words rang in the ears of those who listened to the “masterful” speech of Mr. Powell. If only we had those words carved on the doors of our schools, churches, and public institutions. Then maybe we wouldn’t have given them a mandate to self-destruction; maybe we all would have stayed firm against the madness within. But I don’t see those words and my heart is full of sorrow.

We are losers and we are to be wasted. That’s what Mr. Powell and Co. think about us. There is no salvation for us unless we realize this simple truth.  And when we realize it, we will have to understand the following: those people in power do not pursue our interests. They pursue the interests of their own. Those are very small, very personal interests of the very small, very ignorant and very predatorish individuals, the ones, who don’t deserve to lead even a dog team, much less the great country like ours. They are incompetent, unstable and dangerous.  We should stop supporting them, demand their resignation, reject their goals and save ourselves. Only then we will not be wasted. Simple, isn’t it? We just need to stop nodding our heads in  the Year 2004.

Mark Sashine panurg@att.net is an engineer and  writer.  This article is copyright by Mark Sashine,  originally published by opednews.com Permission is granted to forward this or to place it on a website as long as the article is included intact, including this statement.