What are mothers doing on this Mothers Day?

Mothers Day 2007. Let's see ... some of the less celebratory things mothers will be doing in Middle Eastern countries this year:
Zuhre Dyab will be remembering, as she does everyday, her son, Mohammed who was killed in his small village outside Tyre (Lebanon) fighting to retain his home, his culture, his right to his humanity and that of his family and growing children. She may even remember what her other son, Ali, told me when I visited them late one night in January 2007:
" Next time you come here my mother will be holding a photo of me as a martyr."

When I protested he said, "What else can I do about the situation? I know that if we sacrifice now future generations can be free. I saw my best friend badly burned in a bomb attack during the summer and I took him away from the fighting on my motorcycle."

I asked, "Did he survive?"

The young man answered, "Actually he was mostly dead when I took him away. His skin was black from burns and it was falling off his body in strips. I removed him so that the dogs wouldn't eat his body."

Maybe Zuhre is wondering who will remove her son, Ali, from the fire and the bombs when the next battle starts in southern Lebanon and he is burned.

Maryam, from Qana, yes, the Qana where the only thing that thrives are the ever-growing memorials to yet another massacre. As incredible as it sounds, Maryam lost 52 relatives in a single night when IDF missiles hit the basement in which they family had been sheltering for 17 straight days. A baby as young as ten months doesn't stand a chance against missiles and collapsing building materials... neither, as is turns out, did 51 other people, including Maryam's hardy husband of 40-plus year.

Read the article Don't Send your Sons...

While mothers in America are taken to brunch and receive flowers and phone call from their kids, thousands of Iraqi mothers have fled their homes (remember, the home is the heart of the Iraqi family where women find, not only security and peace, but also empowerment, respect, and autonomy) and wait with thousands of other mothers and children at the largest refugee processing center in the world outside Damascus. On the way to this haven of bureaucracy and paperwork, these families have had to outwit and outrun the many militias and religious factions lying in wait along the highway who rob, preach to, and threaten them. Then, when they are finally allowed into Syria, they must find a place to stay -- defined as "visitors" until their paperwork is complete (about 6 months and more) -- competing the thousands of other families just like themselves.

Am I chastising the might Mothers of America on this all-American Mothers Day turned into another Hallmark or Disney Day-o-Spending-to-Substitute-for-Reality? Not really. I mean, go ahead, enjoy the holiday (if it was really a holiday, wouldn't it be on a work-day... ? But, no, then moms would have to find babysitters while they went to work as usual). You deserve it.

But so do the mothers whose families and kids our policies are diminishing everyday.

Letter "from an angry soldier" ...

This letter was posted on SF Craigslist (http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=33141488) and quoted here in its entirety. No edits, no cleaned up FCC "violations" -- just straight talk from one broken heart.

From an Angry Soldier
Date: 2007-04-10, 1:00PM PDT

I'm having the worst damn week of my whole damn life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-fucking-lutely sick to death of it. What the fuck do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever god damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such fucking experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a god damn thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that fucking hell hole, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

How do I dare say this to you moronic war supporters who are "Supporting our Troops" and waving the flag and all that happy horse shit? I'll tell you why. I'm a Marine and I served my tour in Iraq. My husband, also a Marine, served several. I left the service six months ago because I got pregnant while he was home on leave and three days ago I get a visit from two men in uniform who hand me a letter and tell me my husband died in that fucking festering sand-pit. He should have been home a month ago but they extended his tour and now he's coming home in a box.

You fuckers and that god-damn lying sack of shit they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad.

And you know what the most fucked up thing about this Iraq shit is? They don't want us there. They're not happy we came and they want us out NOW. We fucked up their lives even worse than they already were and they're pissed off. We didn't help them and we're not helping them now. That's what our soldiers are dying for.

Oh while I'm good and worked up, the government doesn't even have the decency to help out the soldiers who's lives they ruined. If you really believe the military and the government had no idea the veterans' hospitals were so fucked up, you are a god-damn retard. They don't care about us. We're disposable. We're numbers on a page and they'd rather forget we exist so they don't have to be reminded about the families and lives they ruined while they're sipping their cocktails at another fund raiser dinner. If they were really concerned about supporting the troops, they'd bring them home so their families wouldn't have to cry at a graveside and explain to their children why mommy or daddy isn't coming home. Because you can't explain it. We're not fighting for our country, we're not fighting for the good of Iraq's people, we're fighting for Bush's personal agenda. Patriotism my ass. You know what? My dad served in Vietnam and NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

So I'm pissed. I'm beyond pissed. And I'm going to go to my husband funeral and recieve that flag and hang it up on the wall for my baby to see when he's older. But I'm not going to tell him that his father died for the stupidty of the American government. I'm going to tell him that his father was a hero and the best man I ever met and that he loved his country enough to die for it, because that's all true and nothing will be solved by telling my son that his father was sent to die by people who didn't care about him at all.

Fuck you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the god damn mother fuckers who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell.

Bad news...

For the last year and a half (since mid-2004) my military child has not been deployed to any combat zones. This after being deployed to Afghanistan for nine months and then, four months later, to Iraq.

While it has been a tremendous relief to have him "CONUS" (Continental US) I've always known that it was just a matter of time....

Meanwhile, I've counseled hundreds of military personnel about various facets of their rights within the military and heard just as many stories of military life. (Call 1-800-394-9544 or see www.girights.org for more info.)

Lately, TOO many stories are related by young people severely exhausted and traumatized by their deployments -- particularly to Iraq as the combat zone in Afghanistan is still painted with the brush of a "righteous war". ("Righteous" in the opinion of many Americans as it is a war of revenge for 9/11. That the Afghan people are paying with their lives for the actions of a non-Afghan resident is, it appears, unimportant...not to mention illogical. But, that is the nature of revenge.) Some military personnel are redeploying for the third and fourth time! My child has not had to do this. And, I know that we've been very lucky.
But, now, at the end of the week, he'll deploy again. Not to Afghanistan. Not even to Iraq. So, thank god for small mercies! I'm not at liberty to say where he'll deploy but, so far, it is not a combat zone. Nevertheless, the blackness that I experienced during his combat deployments is returning. That familiar feeling that nothing much matters, that everything is going to hell in a handbasket, that there is no point in getting up and going to work, that our so-called "leaders" can send our kids off to a killing-field of our own devising and there is not much we can do about it. Certainly not much we can do in a reasonably effective amount of time...

meanwhile... back at ye olde base...

volunteering on the GI Rights Hotline (counseling service for GIs at 1-800-394-9544 or www.girights.org) is a education in how our U.S. military functions and how it breaks down (some) people's spirits.
Here is a recent article about general resistance to the military
My last article about the goings on at Ft. Hood can be read here before catching up on the news, below.

"Tom" turned himself in at Ft. Sill, OK, after being AWOL for 9 months. He was shipped back to Ft. Hood about 10 days ago. Since that time he has waited for (1) a uniform (2) blankets for his bed; sheets would be nice too, but, hey, he's not that fussy so blankets would suffice (3) any evidence that the military has even noticed that he's back.. in the form of a date that he'll be court martialed or discharged ... or anything. He's stuck in that Kafka-esque thing where to ask encourages ridicule, bad mouthing, or simply being ignored. So. He waits. And waits. Meanwhile his wife and son have no idea of when he'll return. Could be a month. Could be a year.
Friday nights on base are, apparently, pretty wild. The young soldiers get mightily drunk and fight a lot.
Last Friday the young wife of a soldier recently deployed to Iraq came to the base to visit with her husband's five friends. They drank alcohol together and the party got out of hand: the wife was raped by her husband's five friends. Not sure if charges are pending (she will have to have a LOT of courage to stand against the onslaught that will come her way if she does charge them). My bet is that she will go home, suffer in silence, and hope to god no one tells her husband what happened ....

... pictures speak louder than words...

In an ongoing effort to educate and inform about cluster bombs, here are a few stages of a cluster bomb unit ("CBU") exploding to disperse hundreds of bomblets. Download a page of facts on CBUs
(These images were harvested from the music video, "Oh, Baghdad, they killed you" - see video below)

More on cluster bombs...

How much has happened since my last post in this space (back in August 31, 2006 -- see below) when I kvetched about cluster bombs...

Since then I've traveled in Lebanon and walked (very carefully) in the land heavily infested with cluster bombs. Over four million cluster bombs were dropped in southern Lebanon, most dropped in the last days of the bombardment when a ceasefire was immanent. That is one bomblet per person (Lebanon has about 4 million people). The pic above of a billboard warning people about how to recognize these explosives is very common in southern Lebanon and Be'kaa Valley. Read more

Almost every day I read Beirut's English language newspaper -- The Daily Star is believed by some residents to be a CIA publication -- I found another story about someone -- an old man in an olive orchard, a young child herding sheep, for example -- mortally wounded by one of these horrible munitions.

Yet munitions companies -- particularly U.S. companies -- continue their manufacture. Why? Why do we -- American citizens -- continue to ignore the devastation caused by these bomblets? Imagine your kid playing outside and suddenly, poof, an explosion, a scream, and your kid is mortally wounded or loses a limb...

Read articles about these travels in several small villages in southern Lebanon:
Don't send your sons ...
and
The medium is the message - El Zohara television

"...any soldier that refuses to fight in this war has my respect."

...quoted from Kyle Snyder who, having participated in war, is now resisting it ... from Canada (read his story: ttp://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/110/27/).

Robin Long, another warrior and war resister seeking refuge in Canada, says, "...a soldier is just a uniform following orders, a warrior is the man or woman that follows their conscience and does the right thing in the face of adversity."

I find this very touching... "a warrior is the man or woman that follows their conscience and does the right thing in the face of adversity." For, yes, Robin is extending the current definition of a warrior and his extension is particularly important in light of the prejudice that exists against the military by the Left and peace activists.

As a “military mom” who has skin in the game (my child is a well trained warrior fighting in the Global War on Terror) as well as a thoroughly anti-war woman derived from generations of men who fought in various wars, I’m in a unique position experiencing the American “left” and “right” ideologies on war.

While I did not live in the U.S. during the Vietnam War era, I was affected by this war even in far away South Africa. Somehow, I was affected viscerally. I "knew" -- albeit I had very little understanding of the politics accompanying war -- the broad expanse of what was happening in Vietnam to the indigenous people and to the invaders. Maybe I knew it because I'd grown up hearing the war stories of my family members in war: my great grandfather engaged in the British war in Afghanistan in the 1830s; my Welsh grandfather was a home guard in England during the WW II Blitz and I heard his stories of death and destruction; my English grandfather went to South Africa as an 18-year-old soldier for the British Empire against the guerilla Boers; my Afrikaner grandmother - yes, she married a British soldier! - was 5th generation resister to British colonialism; my two brothers deployed as conscripts for the Apartheid regime (this was after Vietnam War) on "the border" of Angola.

Essentially, while the venue, the weaponry, the faces change, the essence of war is always the same: it is about destruction and “power over.”

Growing up amongst people who have experienced war and paying attention to the symptoms and detrimental psychological effects of war, I notice the “shorthand” or sound-bite thinking that is common amongst Americans about war: American Left = war and military: BAD; American Right=war and military: GOOD.

Robin Long and others like him - Kyle Snyder, Darrel Anderson, Kevin Benderman, Lt. Watada, Agustin Aguayo – may have entered the military as ideologues and for a variety of reasons (including excellent salesmanship by recruiters) but they’ve come out as empiricists. It is a great thing for this country that they’ve managed to hold onto their humanity, despite military training, and that they now not only refuse to participate in killing but are willing to promote the discussion about war. They’ve engaged the realities of war on the battlefield and now they’re engaging the war of ideologies and communicating their learning to deepen the debate in this country about war.

Robin has learned that a "warrior" is an archetype and not "just" a stereotype of a numbed-out killing machine. It is particularly touching that this young man has come to this understanding through the day-to-day experience of war. It is a triumph of humanity that people like Robin Long, Kyle Snyder, Kevin Benderman, Lt. Watada, Agustin Aguayo and so many others manage to hold onto their humanity... despite the training… and refuse to participate in the killing.

The definition of "warrior" is broad. Let’s introduce the concept of the warrior archetype into the anti-war movement. To be a warrior is not to be "for war." To be a peace activist is also to be a warrior. To be a warrior for truth, and community, and generative ideals such as collaboration, negotiation, multilateralism, and the complexity of diversity is to be a warrior for peace.