Absolutely Horrible

I apologize for offering this awful, terrible video. I am ashamed of my country, “the most powerful nation in the history of the world”.

Description from the website:

“a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.”

Why am I posting this? It’s because it’s reality. We live in a world where humans do incredibly inhuman things to one another. We imagine we have a “civilization”. Watch this and tell me the value of our civilization. It isn’t like we haven’t been told, that we haven’t been given instruction in finding a different path.

As a Quaker, I embrace non-violence because I know that the God-Christ-Essence is in every on of us; that killing people is an offense against the God of every religion.

More from The Nation (excerpt):

“Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”

Those words, spoken by a faceless soldier, echo from a classified US military video released by the site Wikileaks.org. The release comes on the heels of the revelation of a cover-up in Afghanistan–and the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, as well as the anniversary of his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

King spoke to the Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, saying “It should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”

Hearing allegations that special forces troops in Afghanistan may have dug the bullets out of their pregnant victims bodies to hide evidence, hearing airmen on the Wikileaks tape begging “Come on, let us shoot!” and hearing the editor of Wikileaks say that the shooters talked in the way that people do when they’re playing video games–it reminded me of King’s words.

You can write this off as some isolated mistake- go ahead. “Things happen in a war”, right? These things are unacceptable under any circumstances.

I cannot help but believe that if we spent a fraction of the money, resources (and blood?) on finding ways to live in a world without war, we could manage to end this insanity. Now we have the brightest, most accomplished, most technologically superior people on earth working 24 hours a day to invent better ways to kill other humans. We can do better.

We need to do better. War is not the answer. Find another way, by God.

Excuse me while I go throw up.