It seems strange to be so filled with worrisome thoughts.
To be so filled with angry thoughts.
To pray for common sense to pour in the brains of America's leaders.
I rehearse love songs for a supper-and-song evening for Valentine's.
It seems unreal to know that Iraqi singers live in fear of America's loving kindness in dispensing of bombs on their households.

What an enormous drain of American energy to pursue this single-minded, narrow-minded, excruciatingly expensive path, a path whose tallies will be in body counts.

Did you know that one day of bombing equals the annual budget for the children's services program for New York City? One second equals the annual cost per student in the New York City school system?

I have long been skeptical of what government leaders say; now I refuse to believe anything they say. They have little truth in them, and what they do have, they will bend to suit their purpose.

But as long as we have mouths to speak, paper to write on, electrons to push through ethers, we can demand a civil justice, we can fight as hard for all people to be allowed to live dignified lives as others fight to bomb them "into the Stone Age."

The trouble is, those who have power have evinced an overwhelming deafness to anything but their own "war-speak."

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech at New York's Riverside Church not too long before he was murdered. One sentence that I caught in an Alternative Radio broadcast about it is so pertinent: "The bombs that are dropped on Vietnam explode at home." (Forgive me if I don't have it quoted exactly--I jot these down when I listen to the radio in the car.) I believe that the United States and Americans abroad will experience precisely that if our military bomb Iraq.

Speak to me of hope…please.
Cherie

Photo and writing copyright 2003 by Cherie Staples.