Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

One of my earliest memories, I must have been two or three years old, was seeing this picture on our fuzzy black and white television of soldiers fighting in Korea. It was footage of GI's loading and firing a howitzer. They were in the snow and every time they would put a new shell in the cannon and then turn away and hold their ears, the gun would fire and the concussion would cause the snow to rise off the ground while the announcers voice was talking about the Cold War. I thought it was called the Cold War because they were fighting in the snow.

I had no sense of history when I was three and I hadn't been keeping up with the news. The Bush administration likewise has no sense of history. The last time we tried to intervene in Korea it cost over 50,000 American lives and over a million Koreans. And after all those lives spent, we were back exactly where we started, The 38th Parallel.

When MacArthur suggested that we drop a nuke on them, instead of the pursuing the costly ground war that we were fighting, Truman canned him.

Today, we are still sitting on The 38th Parallel, but we aren't the only ones with nukes anymore. The Koreans probably have several by now and also the means to deliver them to Anchorage or Seattle.

Now the Bush administration has taken the first step to another Korean war. They have refused direct negotiations with Korea about WMD's. The first step to war is a breach of communications.

When we entered Korea with MacArthur's bold invasion at Inchon in Sept of 1950, the CIA, in it's typical fashion, told President Truman that the Koreans had 3,600 troops. MacArthur claimed rightly that there were more like 136,000 North Korean troops. As a result we didn't have 'catastrophic success.'

Already our armed forces are stretched thin trying to manage a country of 22 million people (Iraq) where they estimate that the insurgents only number 20,000. North Korea has another 22 million potential soldiers and if we take on Iran, that's another 67 million that we will have to subdue. Are you ready for your sons and daughters to have a career in the military?

And as long as we're saving the world from tyranny and threat, why don't we just jump on the Chinese and the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Russians? We know that they all have nukes. Hell, we could all be soldiers before you know it. It could be the American National Occupation. Forget manufacturing and farming and medicine and science. Let's all be soldiers and rule the world. We can export the rest of the jobs.

That is the logical conclusion of our ever encroaching gross military complex budget.

We just had two little kids killed at school bus stops in Pinellas County (my urban [Mid-16th century. From Latin paeninsula , from paene “almost” + insula “island.”] pen·in·su·la)
The first last fall and the second last week. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Why?
Because we don't have enough school bus drivers and they don't have adequate training and they drop kids off where they'll have to cross the street at busy intersections and we are a consumer junky society as well, driving our cars bezerking.

People don't see the connections between our imperial military budget and little kids placed in danger cuz we ain't got enough schools and school busses and right trained drivers with living wage salaries.

It must be a cold war, yeah, cold hearted.

Warm hearts are needed.

Anyhow you have given me an idea for a letter to the editor of the Timez.
My step an fetchet son is fixin up a bowl to smoke.