By Missy Comley Beattie, 6/3/07
“This is our country’s
calling. It’s our country’s destiny.”-George Bush, Memorial Day,
2007, speaking about his war
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.-That to
secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just Powers from the Consent of the governed,-That whenever
any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it
is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem
most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.The Declaration of Independence,
July 4, 1716“Good-bye Americayou are
not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter
how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless
you want it. It’s up to you now.”-Cindy Sheehan, Memorial Day,
2007
Cindy Sheehan is my friend and my inspiration.
When she sent her soul-baring resignation to me, I responded
and we exchanged a flurry of emails. And I cried. I cried for
her, for Casey, for my nephew Chase, for all our troops who have
been betrayed, for Iraq, and for the people here at home whose
pursuit of happiness has become a trail of tears because of a
lie-based war, i.e., the Bush Doctrine.
George Bush is not my president
and he doesn’t represent my values. War is not our destiny and
it certainly wasn’t Bush’s when he was AWOL from Alabama during
the Viet Nam Conflict. In November, a demand was shouted “from
the mountains to the prairies to the oceans, white with foam.”
This enormous vote against Bush’s legacy provided hope. Idealistic
then, we now realize that we spoke to sealed minds, deceived
by those we trusted to act on our behalf. We can no longer deny
the truth of what we have lost in this sinkhole that is not a
democracy, but both a corporatocracy and a kakistocracy. Even
our places of worship are big businesses, mega-churches with
mammoth television screens, mounted high for those who don’t
have front-row seats to the pleas for donations and the laying
on of hands.
Cindy Sheehan ended her resignation
letter from the peace movement with the challenge that the future
of this country is up to us. By matching her courage with our
own, we can show Team Neocon, which includes Congress, that war
is neither our “calling” nor our “destiny,”
despite what the worst president in history would have us believe.
Change is on the lips and in the hearts of the people throughout
this land who recognize:
When in the Course of human
events, it becomes necessary for one peopleto dissolve the political bands
which have connected them with another to assume among the powers
of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws
of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect
to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare
the causes which impel them to the separation.(The Declaration of Independence)
Let us expand on the Bush &
Co. claim that the “defining challenge of our generation
is the jihadist threat” by recognizing that our conquest-oriented
foreign policy has given birth and inspiration to this threat.
Let us abandon a foreign policy
that pours money into the bank accounts of those (and their cronies)
in the highest offices of our country while spilling the blood
of our troops into the sand and soil of target lands whose resources
Corporate America covets as it devastates and decimates the population
of those places we invade and occupy.
Let us dissolve the
political bandits who make pre-election promises but fail to
keep them once sworn into power.
Let us establish a party representative
of the people.
Let us take up the baton from
Cindy Sheehan who will be immortalized as one of the world’s
great humanitarians while the Administration of George Bush,
a cog in the wheel of a failed machine, will be judged an epic
failure.
So, Cindy, retire in peace.
And then reemerge, energized. You, my dear friend, will have
the support of all who believe that our voices must never be
silenced. We can unite to alter and abolish a form of government
which has a history of repeated injuries. Return, roaring.
We’ll roar with you.
In numbers too big to ignore.
—
Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She’s written
for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine.
An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in
Iraq, she’s a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed
a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine
Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,’05, she has
been writing political articles. She can be reached at: Missybeat@aol.com