War Musin'
or Schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales.
by
Richard Castaldo
Many of you might know me from bowling for columbine the michael moore documentary, my name is Richard Castaldo
and 9 and a half years ago i was shot in the infamous columbine event.
i've spent a lot of that time, pondering why something like that happened.
And i recently figured out why; I got another famous documentary from Ralph's (a local groceery store here in heathehen los angeles, my current home, i left denver) called "Why We Fight", centererd around the very noteworthy speech of the then exiting preesident Dwight Eisenhower.
In the movie it explains in great detail, how bloated our military budget is. And no, for the Neo-cons reading this I am not against the concept of having a military or using the military for defense in anyway. But, the basic thesis of the movie, which is implied as opposed to being explicit in the movie, is that when you spend an ungodly amount on instruments of death, as this country seems to, you're going to find a way to use them oneway or another. Both the republican and democratic candidates running for president want to increase military expenditures,which i find appaling considerding how thery're already higher than practically all of the rest of the world combined. Can we really honestly say we're a peace loving country if we spend that much more money on the military than any other country?
I recently attended a massive iraq-war protest in Denver during the Democratic National convention, christening Obama. I also saw one of my favorite bands, Rage aginst the Machine, salute iraq veterans. Putting to bed the idioticfake-republican truism of, "if you don't support the war you dont support the troops", as people like sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin would have us believe. And there were 70 troops there who don't support this totally useless war. But frankly,the Iraq war is almost beside the point, the current war is really just a symptom of the before mentioned "Military Industrial Complex".
War is not the answer to every problem. Saddam Hussein was obviously not a good guy because he was directlyresponsible for a vast number of deaaths. But, guess who else is responsible for thousands and thousands of innocent civilian deaths? Well, i'm obviously talking about this government especially under the direction of George Bush. I noticed that fox news' Oliver North ( who incidentally remains an
uncovicted war criminal) is keen on mentioning that "Imperial Japan" needed to be defeated during world war 2.
What they fail to mention is that by any objective definition this country has become imperialistic. The Iraq war is nothingbut imp[erialsim. To every iraq war apologist out there, iraq is not our goddamn country, we don't have a rigth to be there, just because certain politicians think they hear the voice of God teklling them that Islam must be defeated or whatever the hell they think. Isn't that what were supposedlyfighting against? Religous extremism? Why the hell would you fight religous extremism with more religous extremism?
alright well back to columbine, I've always thought this let's solve every problem with violence approach at least indirectly responsible for cthe shooting.
One of them had said that in a war people die. I wonder where he got that idea? He sounds like a super-hawkish politician explaining away "collateral damage", which is just a euphimistic wasy of saying, well gee whiz i guess we killed some innocent people. What a nice message for the kids! The thing i realized was that in the minds of the killers I was merely collateral damage. Well I'm not collateral damage anymore than innicent iraqi innocent women andchildren are. And the whole concept has got to be one of the most disgusting concepts in the english language. We were bombing iraq on a weekly basiswhen the shooting occured. I remember when the president came on explaing why we needed to do it, and i didn't buy it then and i still dont buy ittoday under a differnet president. I honestly don't feel like my life is more valuable than anyone elses, but i guess the media does, because the victims of columbine got coverecd way more than the victims of iraq. Not that i don't appreciate that people care, because i very much appreciate it, I just wishother more aggregious attrocites would get covered with the same gusto.
Which is basically just propaganda as far as i can tell, people don't want really know how awful war really is, the president just has to mumble something about freedom and everyone goes, yeah!!. It seems sort of ironic that the termMoral relativism is most often used by right wing republocans as a criticism of left leaning democrats. What could possibly be more morallyrelativistic than implying that the innocent woman and children we kill in the the procedures of invading a country are somehow less importantthan the people saddam hussein killed? It's really not that surprising to me that something like columbine happened in this country. In there minds they were wronged by being bullied, so they took it out on the wrong people. It sounds exactly like what george bush has done after 9-11 , invade the wrong country.
