|
CounterPunch
March 8,
2003
"There are
More of Us Than You Know, and There are More of US Every Day"
Elegy for Two
Giraffes and a Zebra
By BRUCE JACKSON
This morning's New York Times had a front page
photograph and article about the zoo in Qalqilya on the West
Bank. The photograph showed an adult male giraffe, a baby giraffe
and, near them, a zebra, on its side. They were all dead, stuffed
by a taxidermist. The adult male zebra had died of terror at
the sound of gunfire, the baby had been born dead shortly thereafter,
the zebra had been killed by teargas. I sat there at my desk
and looked at that photograph and I started crying. I thought
of all those dead animals, all those destroyed homes and schools
and villages and farms, all those dead children and all those
dead men and all those dead women and I couldn't stop crying.
It's because of them that we are here
today. [The students at the University at Buffalo asked Oren
Lyons and Bruce Jackson] to be the opening speakers for their
strike and teach-in yesterday as part of the National One-Day
Student Strike for Books Not Bombs.
Because we want no more of that destruction
and death and because we know we must raise our voices and say
we want no more of that destruction and death.
This isn't the first time students at
this university have risen up to protest a war they thought unjust.
There were demonstrations here during the Vietnam War that resulted
in the campus being occupied for weeks by hundreds of Buffalo
police.
One night, just after Nixon invaded Cambodia,
the police fired teargas canisters into a women's dormitory on
Main Street and what was then the Norton Student Union. I have
a photograph of a window in that building with nine holes from
a policeman's shotgun, and I used to have one of the teargas
canisters from Norton but someone stole it from my office. It
was one that had been fired into a Norton stairwell in an attempt
to shut down WBFO, the campus radio station, the only station
in the city of Buffalo that was broadcasting what was really
going on.
Americans got angrier more slowly last
time. We know more now. We have the internet so we're not dependent
on the newsreaders at the three networks and biased or limited
newspaper coverage for our information.
And this time we have a president who
lost the general election who was put into power by a Supreme
Court voting on strict ideological lines driving us into a war
against the advice and council of every industrialized nation
except England.
The Bush administration has dissipated
an astonishing amount of goodwill abroad. They're like the lottery
winner who wins the big one and who, a very short time later,
doesn't have enough cash left to pay the insurance on the two
SUVs in the driveway. I would have thought it impossible to destroy
that goodwill. But they have. In Europe in the winter and spring
after 9/11 the Europeans kept picking up the check. Now they
talk to us with reserve, in embarrassment, as if some member
of our immediate family had just been the subject of a televised
prostitution arrest.
Donald Rumsfeld says, "Well, they
never liked us anyway." That's the depth of insight in our
foreign policy: someone disagrees with us and it's "They
never liked us anyway." I stopped using that excuse for
failure in the third grade. When did you stop using it?
The initial phase of this, the Defense
Department says, will cost $100 billion-that is twice as much
as the federal government budgeted for education last year.
That comes to $800 per American for the
first attack. How many people are in your families? How much
do your $800 shares in this war come to? How large is the tuition
increase just imposed on you? George W. Bush is spending your
tuition increase on the first phase of his Iraq war, a war just
about nobody else in the world wants. There's no money for health
care, education, housing, infrastructure-but there's $800 for
every living American for the first attack.
That's not the only attack we have to
worry about.
More and more of our foreign students
live in fear. They are now being tracked. If they get sick and
have to lighten their course load, they can be deported. They
fear they could, at any moment, be scooped up by John Ashcroft's
mind police. Many foreign students who are with us in spirit
are not here today for that reason.
There are ever increasing assaults on
the Bill of Rights. While the Orange Alert was up two weeks ago
and they sent you out buying perfectly useless duct tape and
plastic sheeting, they were giving more of formerly protected
lands to private developers and working harder to bring PATRIOT
II to reality. And all the while Bush has been fighting tooth
and nail for tax cuts, nearly all of them going to the rich,
nearly all of them increasing interest that you will have
to pay.
One of my students said to me, "What does it matter what
we do? They don't care."
It may be true that Bush and Ashcroft
and Rumsfeld don't care what you think. But what you do does
matter.
I remember hundreds of thousands of people
on the Washington mall and then marching to the Pentagon in October
1967. Lyndon Johnson said he was paying no attention. A year
later he decided not to run for reelection because he knew he
could not win.
I remember hundreds of thousands of people
marching through Washington streets in November 1969. Richard
Nixon circled the White House with bumper-to-bumper school busses
and issued a press release saying he was watching a football
game. He wasn't. He was getting reports on what we were doing
in the streets. He too was eventually brought down by his arrogance
toward the American people. It took a long time, but he left
Washington in disgrace.
Our voices mattered then. Our voices
matter now. Our votes mattered then. Our votes matter now.
Do you know that 41% of Americans believe
Saddam was directly involved in the September 11, 2001, attack?
Do you know that yesterday the Buffalo Common Council defeated
an antiwar resolution, mainly because eight of them thought it
was unpatriotic ever to oppose a president or because they were
among that 41% that doesn't know the difference between Saddam
and bin Laden?
They're in those offices now-the ignorant, the ideologues, the
arrogant. But they needn't be there tomorrow. You vote. You have
friends and families who vote. You have a vital self interest
in destroying Bush's isolationism and having the US once again
be a responsible member of the world community.
The Internet is your friend. The person
standing next to you is your friend (assuming he's not one of
John Ashcroft's spies). There are more of us than you know and
there are more of us every day. Don't get tired. Don't get bored.
Don't think you don't matter-because you do matter. Don't think
we won't win because we will win. We will win.
Bruce Jackson,
an ex-marine, is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen
Professor of American Culture at University of Buffalo. He edits
Buffalo Report.
His email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu.
Yesterday's
Features
The Black Commentator
All
About Clarence
Ben Granby
Nightmare
in Rafah
Fidel Castro
Bush's
War on the Dark Corners of the World
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Riding
the Tiger in India: Will the World's Largest Democracy Become
a Religio-Fascist Purgatory?
Linda Heard
Make Way for Reality Politics
Alex Lynch
Tragedy of the Ridiculous War
Paul D'Amato
Obey
the US or Pay the Price
Ron Jacobs
Peace Treaties, Nukes and North Korea
Shulamit Aloni
Murder
Under the Cover of Rigtheousness
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|