Veterans For Peace Statement on the Tenth Anniversary of the War and Occupation of Afghanistan
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part.
Mario Savio December 3, 1964
Before the smoke had dissipated from the rubble of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon’s west block had stopped smoldering, a sweeping veil of fear and hysteria was drawn across our collective consciousness shortly after October 6th, 2001. The linchpin for a lost decade was set.
Where were you, what were you doing when you heard about the intervention in Afghanistan? Osama Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight and jubilant as he watched US vengeance reap the wild wind of misguided patriotism, and as if by design this country’s economic collapse succeeded beyond OBL’s wildest dreams.
Before the first SEAL team round caught the jihadist between the eyes, there was time enough for countless futures at home to be laid waste by a maelstrom of debt, and Congressional cowards looking no further than the next campaign contributions for solutions.
Ten long years have passed, a sufficient timeline for a fearful new lexicon to take hold during the morass caused by US exceptionalism. None of us certainly had ever heard of WMD. A drone was a honeybee. Now collateral damage and IED roll off the tongues of brainwashed preteens and adolescents, of either sex, on schoolyards and high school cafeterias, where the next wars start – or maybe the next Movement.
Cries have been resonating for this week’s 10-year observance of a seemingly endless US war and occupation to be more than another page torn from a calendar. They now echo from other Freedom Plazas and Liberty Squares across the country, a universal outrage tearing at the fabric of indifference and malaise woven deftly for so long by other Administrations and other corporate overlords, for scores of other lost decades.
The time to force radical change, to “make salt” in the non-violent tradition of Gandhi and King, is now. The machines wrought by war and greed will soon grind to a halt, by the sheer numbers of this new Movement.
Veterans For Peace enthusiastically joins the thousands in the streets of DC and New York and hundreds of other Occupies nationwide willing to confront the gears and levers of the apparatus to make it stop, to create a new world, for the next decade and beyond.
###