Received a picture on my face book page. It was of 4 young men, two of whom have been in the news of late. Travon Martin, and Michael Brown (the one giving the finger) on top. On the bottom were pictures of two black men in Army Uniforms with medals, etc. There was a comment about not giving any attention to the two Black men in Uniform who were, I assume, killed in action.
This is as racist a picture/blog as you can get?
The question is why?
These pictures immediately brought to mind a couple of pictures that I remember from a different time. A different era. A time when people of all ethnic and religious persuasion took to the streets to rally and march and make fools of themselves to protest the actions of their government. I am talking about the late 60's early 70's. A time when "revolution was in the air", to borrow a line from a Dillon song. The two pictures. Well both started on TV and ended up in the Newspaper.
The first one was of a Vietnamese child sitting in the middle of a dirt road with people all around running this way and that. The child was injured and crying, and it tore my heart out. I may have been involved in her being injured as I fought the war my government said I needed to fight.
The second one was of a North Vietnamese soldier on his knees being executed by a South Vietnamese soldier. This is the one that some say lost the Vietnam War for the United States.
How many of us out there remember those pictures or pictures like them. Of the American wounded being carried back from the place that the fighting was taking place. Of piles of body bags being loaded on an airplane for transport back to the United States. How many of us remember the emotions that those pictures of war, of the way we thought about war, and the effect those pictures had on our decisions to do something to stop the War. I do.
Now here is the question and the thing that, besides the outright racist message of the pictures, struck me hardest. Why are we not seeing such pictures on the nightly News casts, on the front pages of our daily newspapers? Where is the coverage of the number of Americans killed and wounded in our Media? Where are the pictures of our dead being brought home in body bags, or nice wooden coffins? And why is this gaping hole in the reporting of our never ending wars in the middle east and southern Asia not being called out. Why are we not demanding that our MEDIA, after all it is a Liberal Media and we know that Liberal Media is basically anti war, cover these horrific events in graphic detail the way they did during WWII, Korea, and WWII?
Why are we the American people, the people who are being charged with paying for these wars, many call them Oil Wars or in my opinion Corporate Wars, with our money and the blood and lives of our children, but not able to see with our eyes what is really going on? What we are really doing to poor brown skinned people in places that "we can't even say their names", (another line from a song, Jackson Browne this time) Why are we expending our money and blood to prop up regimes so unpopular in their own country that the people turn to groups that are raising the terms brutal and barbaric to unprecedented levels?
When will we finally see what these wars of choice are doing to our country, collectively, and personally. When will we demand our MEDIA tell us the truth? When?