If you're angry with the war clap your hands!

Regarding Cindy Sheehan, I'd like to quote an excerpt from a piece I just read today by Christine Rose entitled "Our Arrogance Will be the End of Us":

Last week at the post office I was speaking with a postal worker about Camp Casey. “I respect what she’s doing,” the woman had said to me, “but he’ll never talk to her. He can’t, because then he’ll have to talk to everyone.”

I said. “Exactly. Cindy Sheehan deserves answers. This country deserves answers.”

“I have three sons in Iraq,” the woman told me, “one of them – it’s his third time over.”

“You should go to Crawford!” I replied.

“Well, my sons aren’t dead… yet”

I told her that was the best time to go – before they died.

That reiterated for me how relatively effortless this entire Iraq and Afghanistan adventurism has been for most of us here at home in the States.

I recall a cousin of mine I'd first discovered back in the 70's. About my age, he and his wife and I and mine became friends and shared good times together throughout the 80's. But if there was one thing that particularly disturbed me about my cousin, it was the nonchalance at his employment in a national nuclear research facility in New Mexico; of his willingness to override his seemingly progressive open-mindededness by voting against his conscience in order to assure his job security, even if it meant violating a few of his higher principles.

I suspect that's where a lot of us are with this pre-planned war that 9/11 so graciously facilitated for Bush and his neocon's Project for the New American Century's blueprint for U.S. global dominance. We ignore some principles because, frankly, Bush's adventurism isn't really affecting us. And despite continued evidence that piles higher and higher week in and week out against all the reasons for expending lives uselessly, we listen quietly to the same hackneyed platitudes of the liberation of peoples abroad and our increasing safety at home. These same stale, invalid justifications for nearly four years! Most of us know it's not true but, "Big deal", it doesn't really affect us.

And so, come Monday morning, a postal worker mom with three sons in Iraq returns to her job in quiet acceptance, unmoved by events unfolding around her and her family. After all, it really hasn't touched her. Not yet anyway.

And folks in offices that support work in national laboratories like Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Los Alamos go about doing their work, facilitating the development of bigger and better weapons of mass destruction. By merely cauterizing a few principles it's easy. After all, this war doesn't really affect them.

And then there's folks in Edina, Minnesota who, maybe after taking in a Vikings' game over the weekend, return to their jobs Monday morning at Alliant Techsystems to add to the manufacture of the more than 15 million rounds of depleted uranium ammunition, much of which will poison Iraq for many, many years to come. Our empire building doesn't really affect them either.

Nor did it affect Gerard Matthew who returned from his his tour in Iraq alive and in one piece a year and a half ago. He was lucky. Or so he thought. Then he discovered some members of his unit were suffering from Depleted Uranium contamination. Following their lead, Matthew tested and and discovered he was the most contaminated of all!

With a pregnant wife, Matthew immediately urged her to get an ultrasound to check on their unborn baby. Sadly, they discovered the fetus had a condition common to those with radioactive exposure--atypical syndactyly. The right hand had only two digits. Suddenly the Iraq Matthew thought he'd escaped from untouched has impacted his family's lives in ways he never expected.

Matthew feels extremely angry at a government that never warned him of the dangers of Depleted Uranium and the deformity it visited upon his daughter. Now he speaks out against our nation's "war on terrorism".

For a nation that has not experienced directly the sacrifices often demanded by war, many of us remain eerily silent. We go about our daily lives, ignoring our own higher principles because the policies being conducted in our names don't really affect us. But increasingly the dormant principles buried inside of us are waking and demanding acknowledgment.

Bush may never speak to Cindy Sheehan. But I get this sense the conscience of the nation is speaking to Bush. And it's becoming louder and harder to ignore. And I discern a growing desperation in Bush's tired and soiled justifications for his reckless policies.

As the postal worker with three sons in Iraq waits in silence for the war to touch her, perhaps the time to speak out is now.