Wars As Present As One’s Tongue:
A Letter From Mumia Abu-Jamal on Death Row
I wonder sometimes if the average American stops, looks at the chaos in the world, and wonders, how did we get here?
Does she simply shrug it off as ‘fate’, shake the thought away, and go shopping at the mall in thrall to the new?
Does he put it down as a latter-day expression of the biblical proverb, ‘there will be wars, and rumors of war’, and turn to the latest game on ESPN and mist over the doubt, the fear, the dread?
In the absence of a draft, the imperial wars raging on the periphery are as distant as Mars; battles, bombings, death and dismemberments that can be flicked away as effortlessly as changing the channel.
And yet, they are here. In every election, local or national, the wars are as present as one’s tongue, in the failing economy, in crumbling schools, in the rhetorics of politicians who run one way, and rule another; bombing, killing, maiming, poisoning, assassinating, building today’s disaster into a worse one tomorrow.
We vote our hopes, but politicians follow the weapons industries, new money that flows to the death machine, as cities break, schools imprison, hopitals shutter, and ‘news’ networks lie us into new wars.
Meanwhile, how did we get here? Every major social and political institution, from universities, to media, to churches, to newspapers, played its role, supporting imperial wars, in a kind of false patriotism where offices are honored, even as those who hold them are despised.
If you stop and think, and genuinely wonder; and long for a new, better world, I urge you to read a book I’ve just finished. It’s self-published, brilliantly and passionately written, and while being truthful is full of hope of destroying the military-industrial-media-congressional-imperialpresidential-complex.
It’s “War Is A Lie” by David Swanson, a Virginia author. Check out http://WarIsALie.org
