I've just tried four different times to write a cohesive op-ed piece on how I feel about this topic, and I can't . Just the facts-
One day in America courtesy of the Bush Administration-
- Interior Secretary Gail Norton announced at the Wildlife Science Center in Forest Lake, Minn., that the grey wolf should be removed from federal protection from Maine to the Dakotas.
- American soldiers rape Iraqi boys in U.S. custody; capture their hijinx on film.
- My neighbor comes home dead, but not dishonored; his mother slams Bush, invites the press to the funeral.
I notice this today because this was the news I was reading while waiting to see my Paid Friend.
For once, I didn't feel like a crazy bitch because I think a world with wolves in it has more value than one deeded over to Halliburton.
For once, I don't think it's just 'post-traumatic-related referred depression' when I go out of my mind with disgust and grief at my country's defense department systematically turning good citizens into conscienceless rapists and murderers.
My dad was always telling us how lucky we were we didn't know what war was like.
We didn't know what war was like, because he never talked ,about anything. But we weren't lucky. All five of us have some degree of PTSD.
Killing hurts. Killing violates the soldier and degrades the culture. Wartime killing allows the cat-firework-cornholing element of the population to excercise theirsadism on a grand scale.
Odysseus only took twenty years to get back to normal. Most combat veterans aren't as lucky.
In the middle ages, people who didn't party around the roasting of heretics were ridiculed too.
One witness to the burning of Joan of Arc, one of her executioners, in fact, gave her a cross to hold that he made from the pyre. Her last words, "God Bless you", were to him.
I want to be something better than that man.
La Coursier de Jeanne D'Arc- Linda McCarriston
You know that they burned her horse
before her. Though it is not recorded,
you know that they burned her Percheron
first, before her eyes, because you
know that story, so old that story,
the routine story, carried to its
extreme, of the cruelty that can make
of what a woman hears a silence,
that can make of what a woman sees
a lie. She had no son for them to burn,
for them to take from her in the world
not of her making and put to its pyre,
so they layered a greater one in front of
where she was staked to her own--
