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This is How You Stay Focused
By Cynthia Peters
November 26, 2015
Two more young men were shot in my neighborhood last night. Last week, another unarmed black man was killed by police. Last month, a woman in Ohio whose fetus would have been stillborn had to drive 300 miles to get an abortion. The U.S. has the highest GDP in the world, but women who live here rank an abysmal 28th according to the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index. Even more shocking: the U.S. is home to one tenth of the world’s poorest people, according to the recently released Global Wealth Databoook 2015. “That seems impossible,” says Paul Buchheit on Inequality.org. “It requires a second look at the data, and then a third look. But it’s true. In the world’s poorest decile (bottom 10%), one out of ten are Americans… Incredibly, then, nearly 50 million of America’s 243 million adults are part of the world’s poorest 10%.”
While the world paused to grieve terrorist attacks by ISIS last week, U.S. weapons manufacturers took it as a green light to shore up new contracts and add to their enormous profits and the U.S. House of Representatives exploited the moment to push through racist and xenophobic policies that would exclude certain refugees from entering the U.S. Meanwhile a prime source of terrorist attacks, the U.S. government itself, continued its many decades of state-sponsored terrorism, making us what Noam Chomsky calls the “http://inthesetimes.com/article/17311/noam_chomsky_the_worlds_greatest_terrorist_campaign” To know what it means in human terms, consider the words of former Air Force pilot and drone operator Brandon Bryant who said in an interview on Democracy Now, “I killed 13 people, and only three of them were actual combatants.” He goes on: “I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill at first. It was horrible. The first time was horrible. The second time was horrible. The third time was numbing. The fourth time was numbing. But, of course, the first time sticks with you the longest.”
The victims of his attack are of course not here to tell us how they feel.
Most of us are not former drone operators, but we all have something in common with Brandon Bryant. We watch what our country does to its own people and to others abroad, and we start to feel numb. How can we stay tuned in to all these atrocities? How can we respond in responsibly?:
...........
While the world paused to grieve terrorist attacks by ISIS last week, U.S. weapons manufacturers took it as a green light to shore up new contracts and add to their enormous profits and the U.S. House of Representatives exploited the moment to push through racist and xenophobic policies that would exclude certain refugees from entering the U.S. Meanwhile a prime source of terrorist attacks, the U.S. government itself, continued its many decades of state-sponsored terrorism, making us what Noam Chomsky calls the “http://inthesetimes.com/article/17311/noam_chomsky_the_worlds_greatest_terrorist_campaign” To know what it means in human terms, consider the words of former Air Force pilot and drone operator Brandon Bryant who said in an interview on Democracy Now, “I killed 13 people, and only three of them were actual combatants.” He goes on: “I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill at first. It was horrible. The first time was horrible. The second time was horrible. The third time was numbing. The fourth time was numbing. But, of course, the first time sticks with you the longest.”
The victims of his attack are of course not here to tell us how they feel.
Most of us are not former drone operators, but we all have something in common with Brandon Bryant. We watch what our country does to its own people and to others abroad, and we start to feel numb. How can we stay tuned in to all these atrocities? How can we respond in responsibly?:
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/this-is-how-you-stay-focused/
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