Memorial Day - A Time For Change

Memorial Day is a time to remember those who have fallen in American wars but it is also a time to reflect and question. It is a day to lament the systematic loss of so many valuable, loved members of our community over the last century and during the beginning of this new one. That so many deaths have not added up to a change in American war policy is telling. Tragically, the American economy is based entirely on the practice and production of war. It has become our primary export. Policy mistakes have been repeated, over and over again for decades. Why should we continue to err in favor of generational wars? It is time to correct the disastrous foreign policies of a succession of entrenched plutocrats. Memorialize the dead - end organized, mechanized violence.

I tossed and turned every night. My dreams were filled with images of the young men I'd seen every day at Ft. Sam Houston. Once strong, handsome, and full of life, they'd returned from Vietnam missing limbs, disfigured, and eaten from the inside out by the devils of PTSD. I did not want the child growing in my womb to be a boy. I could not bear the thought of raising a son just to have him snatched from my arms by the American War Machine.

Did Mary Cheney suffer such fearful dreams during her recent pregnancy?


Years later, my nights were sleepless once more. Despite all that I taught him, the recruiters had convinced my son to Be All That You Can Be in the Army. The thread that connects so many mothers and sons, the invisible umbilical cord, was in my case knotted with fear for well over a decade while my son served in various combat zones overseas. My eldest son survived his fourteen year stint of obliging the Masters of War but he has vomited daily since serving in Iraq during Gulf War I. He's undergone two surgeries on his ankles, and is awaiting a second surgery on his shoulder. I sleep better now but he doesn't. Night terrors from PTSD keep him awake into the wee hours.


Will Mary Cheney and her partner mother, Heather, spend long nights sick with fear after their son's enlistment at the age of eighteen?

My grandfather fought with the Canadian Black Watch during WWI. He died years after the "War to End All Wars" of mustard gas caused lung damage and from the alcohol that he used to deaden the horrors he dreamed every night. My father glided into The Battle of the Bulge to fight the "Good War". He never talked about the war but it spoke loud and clear through the anger he carried for the rest of his life.

The World Wars of the twentieth century were massive conflicts propagated by speculators, bankers, and arms manufacturers whose desires for profits surpassed their already questionable humanity. All of the American wars during those turbulent, deadly one hundred years, were created by a handful of powerful, wealthy operators both here and abroad. However toxic for the victim populations, militarism proved to be so lucrative an investment that the upper classes were immediately addicted.

Samuel Bush, Patriarch of the Bush Family War Profiteers and greatgrandfather of liar-in-chief, George W. Bush, was famous for his opportunistic participation in WWI. He did not however, serve his country: he served himself. Samuel Bush was notorious for the manufacture and sale of 75% of the arms used in battle by both sides during the Great War. Samuel Bush was known as
The Merchant of Death.

Another Sam, Samuel David Cheney, born a week before Memorial Day 2007, is the grandson of "The New American Century's" Merchant of Death, Vice President Dick Cheney.


Militarism, like fascism, spread like wildfire from the 1920s through the 1940s. WWII sprang from the ashes of WWI. A brigade of corporate Death Merchants rose in America ready to advance a "New World Order" by supporting Mussolini, Franco, and the Nazi regime.

Materials, products, political and financial support were provided to the fascist movement by William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh, Allen Dulles, John Rockefeller, Andre Mellon, Allen Dulles, Prescott Bush, National City Bank , ITT, DuPont, General Electric, Standard Oil (Exxon), IBM, US Steel, Alcoa, Dow Chemical, Bayer Co., and Detroit's "Big Three" Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler to name just a few of those on the roster of fascist Americans. Roosevelt's government attempted to end the corporate "aid to the enemy" from the states but the profitable aid was continued by transacting through third world countries.

My Dad worked in the auto factories in Detroit before he rode a glider in to fight the fascists in Europe. Ironically, he faced enemy driven vehicles, powered by engines produced by his former employer. How equally twisted, that 45 years later, his grandson would face an enemy in Gulf War I, who was armed with American weaponry and computer technology.

It is also ironic that the smiling grandfather in the above baby picture is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of teen-aged soldiers, children, and yes, even babies. I do not care that the Vice President's grandson, Samuel David Cheney, was born to lesbian mothers. Most gays make wonderful parents. What I care about is Mary Cheney's politics. She supports the destructive neoconservative policies of her father.

Now that she is a mother, will Mary stand up for the children of her nation who fight in these manufactured conflicts, while plutocrats like her Dad suck up billions? Will her son, Sam, serve the American Empire on its battlefields? Will he lose his life, his limbs, or his mind in a war his grandfather or other family members instigate and profit from? Would he then, like so many others, be denied full medical and mental health treatment for his war injuries? Will Sam end up in a military cemetery like this one...

.
or will he send others to die while he carries on his granddaddy's deadly business?

Perhaps motherhood will wake Mary from her comfortable slumber. There were babies born in Iraq on May 23, 2007, too - what of their lives? Eight more American boys and girls died during this last week in Iraq. What of their lives, and the lives of their families?

Millions of men and women have died in corporate wars for plutocratic profits.

Make this Memorial Day a day of change. Work toward peace.

STOP THE WAR PROFITEERS! STOP THE CARNAGE!

MAKE MILITARY CEMETERIES OBSOLETE!


MEMORIALIZE THE WAR DEAD - END ORGANIZED, MECHANIZED VIOLENCE

....Create and Keep Peace....
... Kitchen Window Woman ...