Conversations Overheard

Conversations Overheard/Noted in Passing

It is shocking to me that citizens of the USA can be so utterly thoughtless, when they talk blandly and comfortably about World War Two or genuine "weapons of mass destruction", but fail to identify them as the willful and evil instrument of governments, and the cause of needless suffering.

There is no thought whatosever that airplanes and rockets are used to kill, and maim, and cause enormous suffering, or any awareness that those who die in modern wars (including the war against fascism in Europe and... well, what was the war with Japan about? I wanted to write "fascism", but what am I to think of reports that the US had planned to attach Japan before Pearl Harbor, that there was a competition for resources....?)... the victims in modern wars are mainly civilians--women and children.

This is an enormous cultural failure, a reprehensible if convenient form of ignorance,something enormous in its depravity, a shocking and repulsive moral blindness

El Paso, Texas is a city with a disproportionately large number of individuals who are soldiers,and who have been soldiers, and they naturally seek jobs in what is euphemistically called "law enforcement" or "border control". So there is here a deep culture of thoughtlessness and obedience to authority... .(Not for nothing has one scholar warned that if torture is tolerated within the military, that means it will continue at home among police and others--for another generation.)

This is a deeply disturbing moral failure, a cultural failure, a failure of imagination, a lack of basic humanity.... a frightening defect.... which can only lead to further harm, further suffering, all needless and in the service of nothing just or beautiful...