"What about us?"
If It Bleeds, It Leads
for release 07-11-05
Washington D.C.
We were all saddened and dismayed by the murders in London this past week. Death is never pleasant, especially grisly violent unnecessary death. The Londoners are to be commended for their resolve to carry on with life as usual in the face of this catastrophe. With their gentle stoicism Londoners show their practical good sense and express the common understanding that there is simply nothing you can do about it if a nut case and especially a nut case with a cause decides to blow himself up on a bus. They understand that fact which our leaders are reluctant to admit. You can't protect yourself from random destructive behavior when the foot soldier is compelled by either insanity or conviction or desperation.
Acts of random slaughter are so common right here in the good old US of A that we have invented a term for them--Going Postal. Every few months we read of some worker or school kid who has cracked under the strain of his existence and gone crazy with a deer rifle or a shotgun, marched in to a post office or a high school and taken out four or five of his perceived enemies or tormentors and then of course the story always ends with "then he turned the gun upon himself."
And we shake our heads and say, 'It's a shame, it's a shame,' and then we chalk it up in the category where it belongs. Somebody cracked. For some reason they couldn't cope with the pressures of everyday life and resorted to desperate violence and suicide. Suicidal acts like this have a certain morbid logic--'I may be going down, but I'm gonna take a few of them with me.'
When these unfortunate events occur we waste no time dispatching an army of counselors and expert witch doctors and investigators to try to uncover a motive for the violence. They talk to the actor's family and friends and old school teachers and sift through their emails and read their blogs and try to postulate what must have caused them to go postal.
Yet when we experience the acts of suicidal murder that we refer to as terrorism, do we devote any energy to finding out what might have driven these people to such desperate acts? I'm sorry, George, the old "They are doing this because they hate freedom," excuse is just a dog that won't hunt. A better guess would be, 'They are doing it because they WANT freedom." They want the imperial powers to unhand their land and their politics and their culture and their religion and their resources. Why is this so hard to understand? It's because our government doesn't want to understand it. And they don't want you to understand it. That's why they keep twisting the facts and the language.
It is not in their interest to understand it. They would rather try to sell you on some James Bond fiction that one or two evil geniuses are sitting in their posh Himalayan redoubts smoking hashish, stroking their ocelots in front of an all-seeing tv screen and concocting dastardly plans which their brainwashed minions will blindly carry out because they are evil and they hate freedom. Just how dumb do you think we are, Mr. President? Some of us are starting to tumble to the fact that this is no Austin Powers movie. The people who are carrying out these acts of terror have what they believe to be real grievances.
You have to admire this administration's moxie though. They keep trying to sell you on the idea that there is not broad popular support for what we blithely call 'the insurgency' in Iraq. One man's insurgent is another man's freedom fighter. This government is by means of terminology, trying to fool the public into thinking that outsiders and troublemakers imported from abroad are responsible for what is obviously a native resistance movement. What are they resisting? The same thing the French Resistance was fighting against. Occupation by a foreign power.
The Poet's Eye has observed the journalism business for enough years to understand the principle of, 'If it bleeds, it leads." This is one thing that makes terrorism so effective. It gets headlines. Several million people can gather to prompt our leaders to move upon the problems of hunger and poverty and the mainstream press largely ignores it. Twenty thousand people die every live-long day, every time you wake up in the morning twenty-thousand people have died of starvation in this world. These are not violent spectacular deaths, they are slow miserable ones. They don't bleed enough, they just suffer with no press. Terrorism takes out 50 people (white people) in London or a couple of hundred in Madrid or a few thousand in New York every six months or a year. But every DAY, hunger takes out twenty thousand people, unheralded. Upon whom should we properly declare war, Terror or Poverty?
Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on
Yeah, and if you want it, baby, well you can bleed on me
Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on
Yeah, yeah, and if you want it, baby, why don’cha bleed on me
All over--
(Jagger/Richards)
