Monday, November 05, 2007

The War Protest that Wasn't

BILL MOYERS:

It’s important who owns the press, as we’ve just seen and heard ... but it’s also important who decides what is news.

Why wasn’t it news last weekend when more than 100,000 people turned out in 11 cities across the country to protest the occupation of Iraq … but if you blinked while watching the national news, you wouldn’t have known it was a story? ...

Video clip here.

My comment: There is no public outrage for several reasons ... among those reasons is the silence of the news media. But also among the reasons is the fact that the general public doesn't have a personal stake in the war. There is no draft so "it doesn't effect me".

I remember the 1960s. I remember the terror of going in for my draft physical, the fear of being sent to the front to fight in a war that I didn't understand or believe in.

The reasons for the war didn't make sense to me then. The reasons for this war do make sense to me ... though the reasons offered in the MSM (mainstream media) are not the the reasons I believe we are there. I believe we are there because this war is too damned profitable for too many corporate entities.

When I was gainfully employed as an actual "employee", I was queried one day by a vice president of the corporation about my sense of loyalty - what it means and how it applied to the job he was about to offer me. I told him honestly that I was prepared to lay down my life for my company ... just as soon as I had the sense that my company was prepared to lay down it's life for me. He understood exactly what I was saying.

Now, I ask myself what happens when the country becomes a "company" ... what happens when foreign policy is driven by corporate interests? I suspect the challenges of staffing an all volunteer fighting force and the need to hire mercenaries security contractors to do a lot of the heavy lifting in this war is wrapped up in that set of thoughts ...

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