Reply #118: Davis_X_Machina: Fair enough!

[Peace Patriot]

Maybe that's the lesson. We are indeed sleepy, lazy citizens. Not all of us. I really can't lay that one on myself--nor on others I know who have been vigilant--but why so ineffective? should be asked (of ourselves and others).

Of my various citizen fights over the last 30 years, I think maybe I underestimated the power of corporations and the rich, got onto to NAFTA, et al, too late, after Clinton had signed it (by '99, I was protesting in Seattle, but others had cried the alarm much earlier), and, most of all, did nothing about the "military-industrial complex" (after Vietnam), when activists I know never gave up on the fight, and kept crying the alarm about it (and doing their best to highlight it), and it WAS that, finally, that did us in. Our military might was just too much of a temptation to the BushCons who have been plotting to get control of it for several decades. We got lulled by Clinton who was not particularly militaristic (and who kept a lid on some CIA excesses--the thrust was financial domination, not brute domination, in most instances).

I should have been out there with them, pouring blood on missile heads and going to jail--and then feeding the poor when I got out. (I'm thinking of the Catholic Workers--those right on people!). We all should have been. We have ALL benefited from US military might, in one way or another--the might that controls the wealth that trickles down to us--or once did.

Now we are paying for it--for not seeing straight enough--in bloodshed and ruin, and loss of our democracy.