America Shops ...

... with the exuberance
of greed
above need
squealing zealots
on a rampage
while the soldier fears
for his limbs
popping beers
with the whites of his eyes
like expoding sins
America shops ...
for the tops in toys
for its girls and boys
oblivious to the band of brothers
and sisters and all the others
over there
where
Thanksgiving
is spent living
just living
one more day
away from mom and pop
and all the fine families
well stocked with gizmos
and videos
and war games
and more and more and more
of the same
what a shame
what a shame ...
America shops.

-- The Unknown Candidate ©2006

(Inspired by Bob Herbert's op ed below and John Lennon's "So This is Christmas" -- Click the Arrow Below to Play)



While Iraq Burns
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.

The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City — where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs — and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.

A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. “All I can tell you,” said a Wal-Mart employee, “is that they were fired up and ready to spend money.”

There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.

Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman’s proposal — it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. — but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.

With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: “I definitely don’t know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don’t even think about the war. They’re more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday’s test.”

His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. “No, definitely not,” he said. “None of my friends even really care about what’s going on in Iraq.”

This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.

According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.

In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: “The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or ‘honor killings.’ Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives.”

Journalists in Iraq are being “assassinated with utmost impunity,” the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.

Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.

Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.

The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.

They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Related Articles:

• Mission in Afghanistan

  There was little to be thankful for on Thanksgiving, writes Jeremie Lucia.

• CNN Iraq Correspondent: Iraq Is "An Absolute Mess"...TV, Print "Can't Fully Capture The Scope"...


• Brent Budowsky: Sad Sunday: Iraq War Longer Than World War Two. JFK Was Right, George Bush Is Wrong

  "The tragic milestone has arrived, the Iraq War lasted longer than the Second World War, with
  the President telling us that many more days are left in his tragedy drenched in blood..
  
  In 1957 Senator John F. Kennedy gave a major address opposing European colonial
  policies and the French colonial dominance of Algeria. JFK warned that these policies and practices gave aid, comfort and strength to Soviet communists who prayed on misery, exploitation and corruption.
  
  Sound familiar?"

• Breaking News: Iraqi Clerics Say U.S. Should Leave

  "Leading Sunni and Shiite clerics in Iraq said Saturday the U.S. military presence aggravates the sectarian violence that is tearing at the country.
  While urging their followers to stop attacks on other Muslims, the clerics said U.S. and other coalition troops should leave, the Los Angeles Times reported."

• Sunday: More than 108 killed in another bloody day of U.S. occupation:

  Police in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, found the bodies of 25 people, including seven teenagers blindfolded and each with a single gunshot wound to the head.

• U.S. Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself

  The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

• Bombing onslaught on Shiite enclave in Baghdad kills 161, stepping up Iraq's sectarian war

  Funeral processions began Friday for the more than 160 people who were killed by car bombs and mortars in Baghdad's largest Shiite district. Hundreds of men, women and children beat their chests, chanted and cried as they walked beside vehicles carrying the caskets of their loved ones. "There is a full-scale sectarian war in the country that the media has not been able to fully project to the world," says Bassam Ali, a political analyst from Arbil.

• Washington's Iraq Chimeras

  Brown and McGovern write: "The war in Iraq began as a war based largely on illusions. But now most Americans realize that the always-illusory option of 'staying the course' in Iraq will never work. This was the main message of the recent Congressional elections. Still, there is a great danger that we will fall victim to additional Iraq-related illusions - illusions fostered by the administration, Congress, the Pentagon and the mainstream media."

• More than 140 bodies turn up�on Baghdad streets


• It was my duty to refuse to go to Iraq, says first American army officer facing court martial

  Lt. Ehren Watada, the first American army officer to face court-martial for refusing to serve in Iraq, said yesterday that it was his duty to recognize and refuse "illegal" orders.

• War on Iraq: Will Papa Bush's Old Pals Prolong the Iraq Occupation?

  "While everyone in Washington is treating Bush Senior's ally Robert Gates' Pentagon arrival and James Baker's Iraq Study Group report as godsends that will end the war in Iraq, it's quite likely that they will deploy more troops and stay there indefinitely."

• Kissinger Says Victory in Iraq Is Not Possible

  "Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who regularly advises President Bush on Iraq, said today that a full military victory was no longer possible there. He thus joined a growing number of leading conservatives openly challenging the administration%u2019s conduct of the war and positive forecasts for it."

• Iraqi Leader in Crisis Ahead of Bush Visit

  With Friends like Bush, Who Needs Enemies?

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Bush, Iraq, US Armament and Defense, International Relations, Foreign Policy, Retail Stores and Trade, Holiday Shopping, news, commentary, The Unknown Candidate, poetry, op ed