Independence Day

Last year July 4th fell on Monday, so when a British customer emailed during
the weekend, urging that the book she was ordering be gotten off first thing
Monday by global priority mail, I wrote her that on Monday the post offices
would be closed and we Americans would gather around charcoal fires in our
yearly ritual of "celebrating our victory over you folks".

"Oh," she wrote, I'd forgotten about your Independence Day," and ended her
message: "But we still love you!"

This year the 4th was on Tuesday. President Bush spoke at Fort Bragg, NC,
home of the 82nd Airborne Division and the XVIII Airborne Corps,
America's only airborne corps and division. "I'm not going to allow the
sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain" by pulling out
before the job is done, he said.

According to news reports it was the first time he spoke the actual numbers of
those who have been killed in this futile war. The row upon row of flag-draped
coffins have always been concealed from view. No trumpeting about Gold Star
Mothers.

I think of the young person led to the altar long ago as sacrifice to the tribal god.
If hunger followed, turbulent weather, game scarce, battles lost, did the tribal
members wonder if their offerings were not adequate or not sufficiently
attractive? Did they select two victims for the next sacrifice?

Bush did not speak the numbers of the 10 to 12 thousand wounded, many
maimed for life. He never has.

Does he not believe that their sufferings can be made not in vain by keeping
our troops in Iraq until there are 10 to 12 thousand more mangled bodies
shedding blood upon that ground.

Where have all the flowers gone....

The idea of propitiating the gods does not remain in the distant past. A
chaplain returned from serving in Iraq, in an interview with Terry Gross on
the National Public Radio's Fresh Air program broadcast on July 6th, said he
had counseled a soldier who believed that God was angry with him because he
had not felt remorse over killing an Iraqi and therefore had "visited" his mother
with cancer.

Couple years ago I was in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the largest anti-war
rally ever held in that city. We, too, wanted to speak to the troops at Fort Bragg,
but that was as close as we could get. We would have told them that we support
them, too. We would support them by not sending them to be wounded and die
in a war that is enriching Halliburton and other big corporations.

Last year I was in D.C. with more than 100,000 marching in the biggest
anti-war action since the end of the Vietnam War. The Bush administration
were not swayed. Polls show that the majority of Americans do not support the
war. Their elected leaders turn a deaf ear, and Bush prattles on about continuing
the bloodshed so that the blood already shed will not have been shed in vain.

I think of the song Pete Seeger wrote and sang during the Vietnam War:

"We're knee deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on."