While the levees in New Orleans needed
repair, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost close to two hundred
million US dollars a day, and while we fight child obesity in certain
social sectors of the United States, somewhere in the world a child
starves to death approximately every three seconds. But we must drive
out the Bush regime not so much to return to a state of law and respect
for life and justice in the United States, but so that there can be
such a state for the first time in this country. From the displacement
and massacre of Native Americans at the very inception of this nation,
the displacement of Mexicans from their land, the building of the
infrastructure and economy on the backs and shoulders of black slaves,
the exploitation of illegal immigrants’ labor to support vast sectors
of industry and agriculture, through the imperial land-grabbing foreign
policy, the Bill of Rights along with the entire US Constitution,
monuments of human thought, pillars of justice and democracy, have
never applied to all people, much less to all people within the United
States. Because to get away with the crimes this regime is getting
away, massive state-promoted injustice and ignorance must have ruled
the land and its people for many generations.
We must drive out the Bush regime, but only as the first step of a long
journey. We must realize that Bush is but a puppet; placed in power
perhaps precisely because he is a puppet. He represents a privatized
government; a government ruled by corporations that in turn represent a
system. It is at that system, the system of capitalism and of which
empire is the champion, that we must aim our efforts, the same system
responsible for the lost lives of the poor black people who died in New
Orleans, responsible for the lives of soldiers (socioeconomic draftees)
and civilians who die daily in the US wars, the lives of the child who
died at the beginning of this sentence as well as the one who will die
at the end of it. We must drive out the Bush regime, but only as the
first step of this long journey to save life on earth.