- How you treat a stranger determines how you treat the
ones you love.
-
- At first you can't see the connection. After all, how
many doors have you slammed in the face of some maddeningly pious Jehovah's
Witness, or screamed into the phone at some gentle grandpa trying to raise
money for the local fire department? Or, best example of all, how many
times have you cussed out a homeless panhandler bugging you for spare change
without contemplating the ragged family he may have squirreled away behind
some nearby dumpster?
-
- Most of us are too busy to care.
-
- In the self-centered savvy of our synthetic 21st century
American lives, we are taught not to realize that how we treat our enemies
- or in our haste, those we would categorize as superfluous to our hectic
agendas - has a direct and debilitating impact on those who we say are
important to us. Our parochial perspectives teach others in our family
how to be cruel. We are taught that some people are less deserving than
others, that our way of life depends on recognizing and perpetuating these
distinctions, and that's the way most of us live.
-
- What happens when those distinctions become blurred?
If we hate others on the basis of propaganda lies, how do we decide who
we'll love and know the reasons are true?
-
- Most obviously, it is beginning to dawn on many of us
that the way America abuses the luckless inhabitants of less-developed
lands is beginning to unmistakably resemble the way the U.S. government
now roughs up its own citizens, without regard to their rights or their
humanity or whatever noble motives they may have, in favor of how big their
bank accounts are, and how much they'll pony up to participate in this
sleazy scam of corporate conquest and bottom-line tyranny that is now sweeping
the planet.
-
- It's as if there's a colossal rush by everyone to buy
their way into hell.
-
- Consider, just for a moment, groups of Palestinian children
gunned down for sport by bored Israeli stormtroopers, or Afghani families
bombed from the sky by hopped-up American airmen just for shooting celebratory
rifle shots into the air during a festive wedding. Compare them to white-haired
retirees and principled college students assaulted with truncheons and
pepper spray by masked Miami police thugs just for protesting the destruction
of American prosperity by rich men who give allegiance to no country.
-
- What's the difference? We are all citizens of the world
now - all eligible to be jailed without trial, killed without warning by
those who have deemed us excess baggage.
-
- It's much like the way we see that vagabond on the west
side of Manhattan trying to clean our windshield. Chances are good, in
this raging age, that you'll have a chance to experience that as the American
economy continues to be propped up by lies, as more families lose their
homes and livelihoods. Then you too will see the ugliness of that temporarily
affluent man inside the car, racing off to fulfill his endless commitments
without seeing his own future waving that squeegee in desperate frustration
receding in his rearview mirror.
-
- But beyond the visible parallel of pauperized Americans
more and more resembling gang-raped Iraqis as the herding of humans into
categories and camps accelerates, there lies the truly nauseating specter
of the behavior of contemporary American leaders and its poisonous effects
on America's children.
-
- Contemporary political events and the lies that are told
to justify them are turning America's children into monsters without consciences
willing to kill anyone for cash. Anyone!
-
- Have you noticed the number of kids going to school dressed
in military fatigues? The number of video games where the object is simply
to kill without reason? Is this why we had children in the first place?
-
- Most parents do their best in leading their children
through the labyrinth of regimens and requirements to give them a decent
shot at a functional and productive adulthood. But think of what that involves
now.
-
- It requires teaching a willingness to believe in the
flag-waving lies our leaders tell us. What kind of adults do you suspect
that will produce? You are looking at the future of America and the world,
and you ought to be scared.
-
- It requires explaining to them how it's OK that America's
Secretary of State - Colin Powell, one of the most respected men in the
country - can go before representatives of the entire world and deliver
a totally fictional scenario, simply so that his bosses - the men who make
the weapons - can obliterate an entire country and enable their companies
to pull one of the greatest financial scams in history - the robbery of
the American people to rebuild a country that they themselves have destroyed.
Amid continuing flag-waving, that plan is scheduled to be inflicted on
many more countries which can't defend themselves.
-
- It requires explaining to children why American soldiers
who come home in a box are to be venerated as having done something good,
as having given their lives for a noble purpose. And that requires lying
to your children, and overlooking some serious lies that we told to create
the situation in the first place. Because the soldiers who are dying in
Iraq are dying for lies that so many Americans try to overlook. Pity those
parents who give away their children's lives for lies about weapons of
mass destruction.
-
- To most of the rest of the world and especially Iraqis,
it is Americans who are the terrorists.
-
- The choice left to surviving children whose siblings
have squandered their lives in a war based on lies is to support their
parents and believe the lies, or go mad.
-
- Our children learn what we teach them. For a majority
of American parents, we are teaching our children to overlook the truth,
that real justice doesn't really matter if there is a quick profit to be
made. As American soldiers come home and become policemen, and treat us
in the same way they treated Iraqis, so our children will grow up and behave
in the same duplicitous, immoral way our leaders do now. Why? Because that's
what we have taught them.
-
- I wonder how many parents are naming their new babies
after George Walker Bush or Richard Cheney? And if any are, I wonder what
kind of adults those children will turn out to be?
-
- Will they be children who learn how to steal elections?
How to destroy the Constitution by bribing their friends to support their
lies? To drop diabolical nuclear weapons on innocent foreigners because
there is a moneymaking scheme to be carried out that will make them billions
of dollars? Will they be men and women who will destroy buildings in their
own big cities and kill innumerable numbers of their own countrymen simply
to achieve their political objectives?
-
- And perhaps more importantly, how will these children
- grown up with the lies of the present political machinery indelibly etched
in their own heads - treat the ones they are supposed to love? Perhaps
we can see that now. Perhaps we can see, in the behavior of those who return
from Iraq, how we treat the ones they love " or used to.
-
- Is this why we raised our children? To believe in lies?
To give their lives for lies?
-
- We are teaching our children that it's OK to kill large
numbers of innocent people if those people have some valuable commodity
that we covet. Just pick up any newspaper. Listen to your president, the
man who laughs about people he is about to execute. That's what it's all
about.
-
- How we treat strangers determines how we treat the ones
we love. If we abuse strangers, we can't help but abuse the ones we love.
Not enough people realize this, or don't realize until they're older, after
a few divorces, perhaps.
-
- Need proof?
-
- Consider this snippet of conversation between that crusading
Idaho dentist Len Horowitz and an interviewer about why it seems everyone
in America is sick right now with a brochial infection no one seems to
be able to get rid of.
-
- Horowitz explained: " ... in the contemporary warfare
arena, where experts in biological chemical warfare convene and discuss
the ways that are ideal to conduct warfare today, to really take an enemy
out, you don't want to kill the people. You want to produce people who
are chronically ill and become dependent on the state and totally sap the
resources of the country. And then you can move in further with your military-medical-industrial
complex, your international medical-pharmaceutical cartel. And then you
sell these beleaguered and defeated countries all of the pharmaceuticals
and chemicals that they need to maintain any semblance of healthy function."
-
- Interviewer: "So you've got a work force that can
work, but they're too tired after they finish working to .... "
-
- "That's exactly it," Horowitz exclaimed. "They're
completely depleted. They can't put together a military, you create a dependence
and thereby you weaken the population, and weakened populations are easily
to control. So you've got population control, and you make vast fortunes
doing it, versus just blowing up a nuclear weapon and devastating the infrastructure
that you own. You and your colleagues own that infrastructure. You want
to get rid of the people. You don't want to get rid of infrastructure."
-
- So much for the "why" of this biowarfare now
going on that everyone's overlooking. How about for the "who"
and the "how," according to Horowitz.
-
- "What you're looking at with this upper respiratory
infection is that it is a multi-factorial illness. It's associated with
a variety of chemical and biological co-factors. Just like with AIDS, it's
not the AIDS virus that ultimately kills, it's co-factor microbes such
as the micoplasma ...."
-
- "What you have could be described as an ideal Russian
biological cocktail. And I suppose it's called Russian biological cocktail
because the Americans likely invented it. What they determined would be
the best biological chemical warfare approach was a combination of chemicals
and biologicals, so that it would be very difficult to diagnose and then
treat the illnesses. Moreover, it would be very difficult to trace where
they came from.
-
- "If you've got, say, ethylene dibromide coming out
of the jet fuels that is causing immune suppression and weakening your
immune system, and then you've got a micoplasma microbe or a fungus that
causes an upper respiratory illness, suddenly you develop a secondary bacterial
infection. Now you get hit with antibiotics, and the antibiotics cause
your body chemistry to go acidic, so now you get rashes and other things,
your liver gets full of toxins and comes out through your skin in rashes
and they get hyperallergenic reactions associated with the other chemicals.
-
- "So all of a sudden now, you realize that you've
got a human being who is completely out of balance and infected by two,
three or four microbial co-factors as well as intoxicated by a variety
of different chemicals."
-
- There's your human weather forecast from one of the world's
foremost medical detectives.
-
- How are you going to teach your children about that -
a diabolical conspiracy devised to poison the Russians that has now been
turned on the American people themselves?
-
- And are your children, dressed stylishly in their military
fatigues, going to think that's a groovy idea, very patriotic?
-
- When we are with our families, we like to assume that
everything we do and everything that they do is based on mutual love. Of
course, it doesn't always work out that way, but surely that's what we'd
like it to be.
-
- We have an understanding that family comes first, that
I would do anything to protect and nurture my child under any circumstances,
and that my children, if I brought them up right, would feel the same way
about me, as I most certainly felt about my parents.
-
- It is an understanding most families reach. I don't know
that it holds up, for those families who still support what America's leaders
say and do these days, when you have to teach your children that lying,
stealing other people's countries and killing large numbers of people for
reasons that are lies are OK. Just the way the world works.
-
- In which case, many of these parents could realistically
expect their children to kill them for money, because that's what their
country taught them. And sometimes that happens.
-
- And after 9/11, in which America's leaders betrayed their
people by complicity in an attack on their own country, followed by wars
that were blamed on that phony event, the understanding of mutual protection,
respect and allegiance between a nation and its people has been shattered.
Honest people are very afraid of their dishonest government.
-
- And so has the trust between fathers and sons and mothers
and daughters, because some insist on believing the lies that it's OK to
kill people you don't know for money, while others - still trying to believe
the words of holy men who urge us to love others - won't accept those lies
that have torn so many families apart.
-
- The understanding that once was between those who care
for each other is no longer what it was. The blame can be squarely placed
on an America that has become perverted by its own power, and now threatens
the lives, livelihoods and love of every person on Earth.
-
- How long will it be, under this present trend, until
we look into the eyes of our children and not know them anymore?
-
-
- John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy
Report," a collection of his Internet essays. For more information,
or to make a contribution to a writer who otherwise derives no income from
these essays, click http://www.johnkaminski.com/
-
- For other samples of his essays, click http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html
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