Are You Outraged Yet?

[Lightning Rod]

I'm sure we would be as mad as the people are in Northern Pakistan if a foreign power sent its missiles to destroy a small community in America.

When I heard the news of the US attack in which 17 people including women and children were murdered. I was appalled. The Poet's Eye has seen some pretty grisly things. It takes a lot to appall me. But I was appalled.

Picture yourself in a small mountain village. One day you notice that model airplanes are circling your town. They are unmanned CIA predator drones each carrying four Hellfire missiles. You know that some American joy-stick jockey is flying the damned thing and that, to him, it's just a fucking video game. Makes you feel like the world is safe from terror, doesn't it? Especially when in the middle of the night a couple of blocks of houses are vaporized before your eyes and your children are dead.

Suppose it was your son or daughter or grandmother who was killed in such an attack? Don't you just get a warm and cozy feeling when you think of one you love or even yourself resting under a tombstone on which is written "Collateral Damage?"

Sure, we call it a 'surgical strike', we were going after the devil himself, but you know what the definition of 'major surgery' is, don't you? It's when they are doing it on YOU.

Officials in the village say that "Their information was wrong, and our investigations conclude that they acted on a false information." His account was confirmed by a senior government official, who said al-Zawahri "was not there."

Operating on faulty intelligence? Is this de je vu all over again?

My guess is that it is more likely that al-Zawahri died in the stampede in Mecca than being killed by our video cowboys in the CIA. What we accomplished was killing some innocent civilians.

Ok, here's the deal. The CIA and the FBI and the Navy Seals and Al Queda and the Mafia and and the Aryan Brotherhood, are all in the same category. They are thugs and bullies. And not only that, they are thugs and bullies for hire. You, as an American taxpayer, are hiring thugs to do your dirty work. You are hiring police to snoop into your private records and harass you for your personal habits and you are hiring your thugs to fight their thugs and it all looks so much like the Crips and Bloods on nuclear steroids that it causes The Poet's Eye to water.

Our thugs are well financed. They have gizmos and toys and global positioning satellites and remote controlled bombers. They can trace every phone call or email you ever sent or thought of sending. But they can't seem to find one six-foot-four Arab with an AK-47 who is obviously the devil himself and responsible for all of America's woes. So, in the name of stamping out the devil, we are going to annihilate a few innocents who happened to show up on our X-box. The Pakistanis have a right to be outraged. We should be outraged too.

[hester_prynne]

Hell, I was outraged when the bastards said hell, low.

In fact the blistering outrage has rubbed hard and caliced me I fear....

I've come to just living alongside it, at arms length, (pun unintended), trying not to think of it, because it's like an obsession you can't do anything about, no drug will appease it, no amount of protest will seize it, no amount of handwashing will clean it. It's another fucking weight around my neck I try to forget i'm carrying......

At my lightest of ease of being, I am in my own world, quietly listening to music, feeling nothing but hope and mystery, feeling good about a job well done, a beautiful daughter, trying not to cringe everytime the same God damned thing keeps ominously happening over and over again......

H

[mnaz]

Yes.