A Billion-Dollar-A-Week Kill-Brown-People Habit

Do you remember the woman who sat out on Bush's Texas doorstep a couple years ago, waiting to talk to him after her son was killed in Iraq serving a military tour? Her name is Cindy Sheehan, and today she gave up her quest for peace which started with that personal protest. According to the AP, she made a lot of sacrifices and took a lot of heat along the way, and the sad thing is, while heroic, her efforts seem to have had little tangible effect.

I've been wondering why there hasn't appeared to have been a real strong activist resistance to this awful war, and why the protests waged have seemed to make such a minor difference. Compared to all the images you see from the Vietnam era, things seem pretty quiet these days. Maybe that's just the lens of history magnifying controversy, and a few decades from now we'll be seeing Sheehan's face in the same light. Or maybe I'm not looking hard enough, or maybe the press isn't doing a good enough job showcasing the activists, or maybe there's just too much shit happening in the world today for any one thing to stand out.

Whatever the reason, I keep coming back to the notion that most of us are too comfortable to do anything. There's no draft to worry about, and unless your son just got carted out of Baghdad in a body bag, maybe you're not thinking about this stuff as much as you could. Or should.

Anyway, I saw this posted up at Rhymesayers Entertainment yesterday, and it seems relevant to me. Not the happiest of videos, but these aren't the happiest of times.