My vote for Kerry was a vote against Bush. For me, that moment crystalized when asked if he thought the lives of US soldiers killed in Iraq were "wasted." Kerry was too afraid of alienating voters to answer truthfully.
The answer was and is a resounding "yes" and saying so does not dishonor their sacrifice. It glorifies it by reminding us that their willingness to die for their principles is inextricably woven with their willingness to
trust.
To trust is perhaps the bravest act of all, betrayal perhaps the darkest. More often than not, we choose to look away, to pretend this potential in all of us does not exist, that it is "inhuman."
George Galloway boldly and with conviction speaks what no one wants to hear: that to truly resolve global conflict and human degredation we must first examine our own culpability. We must accept responsibility for our actions or be doomed to repeat them again and again.
Galloway spoke at the G8 Meeting, House of Commons Debates yesterday. I encourage you to read it.
Here are some excerpts*:
"It is...well known that I have a low opinion of this Government. But even I never imagined that they would try to execute a cynical U-turn in their international reputation on the sea of bodies laid out every three seconds as a result of poverty in the world such as that which we have been witnessing these last few weeks..."
"...The Government are engaged in a carefully calculated deception of public opinion to try to draw a veil over the disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and to scramble up at least the foothills of the moral high ground on the greatest issue facing the world today. More than half the world's population lives on half the money it costs to keep a cow in the Elysian fields of the European Union.
"This has been deliberately reduced by new Labour to a question of heavily conditional debt cancellation for some countries in one continent. The conditions allowing a takeover of their countries' economies by the International Monetary Fund, Paul Wolfowitz's World Bank, and the vulture capitalists and robber barons of the globalised corporations will leave the people thus relieved even worse off than they were to start with. Seventy-seven per cent. of the people living on less than $2 a day in the 1990s lived in countries being strangled by free-market structural reforms implemented by exactly that unholy trinity..."
"...Just as one cannot get slim through eating low-fat chocolate when it is not part of a calorie-controlled diet, one cannot make poverty history through conditional, highly selective debt cancellation without a profound change in the distribution of wealth and power in the world..."
"...Let us be clear: the poor people in the poor countries do not owe the rich in the rich countries anything. In so far as they are in debt, it was not incurred by them but by overwhelmingly unelected dictatorships of one kind or another, usually backed in the cold war days by the west. The money was often spent on self-aggrandisement and western weapons. In any case, those original loans were long ago repaid, but for the usury of the hyper-interest charged by western lenders to bloat their £1 billion-a-year-plus profits. Poor countries would be entirely justified in tearing up their debt repayment books and declaring, "We have already paid", and they might well add, "Far from us owing you money, you owe us."
*Courtesy of TheyWorkForYou.com
thanks,
todd