But then I realized I was an American, and despite our myth of innocence that has long dominated public consciousness, killing children is an American tradition.
Fifty years ago -- April 4, 1967 -- at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King stood in the pulpit and thundered out his warning: speaking of Vietnamese children he said:
"They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children, thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.
"Surely this madness must cease," he added. "We must stop now." But of course we didn't stop. The government that continued to rain bombs and napalm down on the Vietnamese, the Laotians, and then the Cambodians, stopped MLK a year to the day later in Memphis and then Robert Kennedy two months later in Los Angeles. Nixon declared himself the peace candidate, proceeded to secretly sabotage Johnson's peace endeavors, and then savagely waged the war for six more years, killing millions more. For his reward, the American people reelected him.
No, "these monsters don't hide under the bed/or in dark closets/they live everyday lives."
Jump to May 12, 1996. Lesley Stahl, on CBS's 60 Minutes, asked Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright if the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children was worth the price of Clinton's Iraq sanctions. To which Albright coolly replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."
A few months later the American people overwhelmingly reelected Clinton and the killing of the Iraqis continued apace. Hey, he played the sax. Cool.
"Liberals," conservatives. Democrats or Republicans -- it makes no difference. Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump -- all killers who are embodiments of the myth of American innocence as the American people play dumb, hiding their heads in the sand as if the world can't see their asses in the air. Desperate for false hope and phony innocence, they argue over the merits of their favorite killers to justify their complicity in a tradition of war-making where children's deaths matter no more than Frank Perdue's dead chickens.
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