Audrey's Letter to the Editor

Editor,

The President’s current strategy for the 4-year old war in Iraq, presented to the American people last week, calls for an increase of troop levels from 140,000 to 160,000. A little over a year ago, in 2005, the US implemented a ‘troop surge’ increasing levels to 160,000 and the violence increased! Are we really supposed to believe it will work this time?

Thousands of US troops have been killed, tens of thousands will suffer their wounds for years and/or lifetimes, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi have died, and even more are flooding neighboring nations as refugees from the violence. And each day the killing is worse than the week or month before.

The cost of this war to-date is around $400 billion dollars. The US is borrowing, on foreign markets, 2 billion dollars a day to pay for the current record-making levels of debt. 2 billion dollars a day not spent on schools, or healthcare, or senior care, or alternative energy development. This is our government, folks, and we’re the ones who’ll have to pay it back.

Every Tuesday, from 5:00 - 6:00 p.m., at the corner of Grinnell & Main Streets, a group of citizens gather to publicly stand for peace and call for an end to this war.

As I have invited people to join us on Tuesday, I am told that vigils such as these are not effective, so why bother. I am told, one person can't make a difference, why bother. I have even been told there is nothing we can do about the war in Iraq.

Why do we stand, every Tuesday, 5:00 – 6:00 PM on Main Street? We stand because we are Americans and Americans will not be long fooled. We stand because, under our God, we are all brothers and sisters and we believe Thou Shalt Not Kill your brothers and sisters. We stand because we will not tolerate geopolitical resource grabs bankrupting the moral and financial fabric of our nation, and our souls. We stand to show we do not agree with, or support, or will continue to allow these actions to occur in the name of our nation. We stand with tens of thousands of Americans who held similar events across our country last week, and with the millions of people around the globe who protest the US occupation of Iraq. We stand because ‘silence is approval’ and we do not approve.

We stand for peace and when we stand we are joined by the spirits of Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Sister Helen Prejean, and the many more who refused, in the words of Dr. King, “to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.” We stand and we do not stand alone. We know one person can make a difference, indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Audrey Malan
655-2282
redearth@wavecom.net