Have We Lost Our Sense of Outrage?

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If you would like to provide support to the people of Lebanon in their time of urgent need, visit this page.

Doctors without Borders:

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/2006/08-03-2006.cfm

This is one humanitarian catastrophe that can be stopped in its tracks, but only if enough people care.
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According to the historian A.C. Saunders, the first time an auction of African slaves was conducted in Portugal in the 1440s, townspeople where the auction was held rioted and interfered with the sale.

Why?

They were outraged by the monstrous inhumanity of it.

A few short years later, what had been seen clearly as an outrage became business as usual and the multi-century holocaust known as the Atlantic Slave Trade was underway.

Until the 20th century, subjecting civilians to bombardment of any kind was considered unthinkable.

Then, advances in aviation made air warfare on a mass scale possible and somehow attitudes changed.

Once such things were an outrage.

In 1937 In Spain, Hitler's air force tested a new form of military attack using the Basque village of Guernica as a subject.

For three hours, German planes pounded the little village with high-explosives and incendiary bombs. The hamlet burned for three days before the fires eventually burned themselves out. Sixteen hundred civilians were killed or injured.

When news of the atrocity reached Paris a few days later, one million protestors filled the streets to express their outrage.

The artist Picasso - a notoriously self-absorbed and apolitical man - was so moved by what happened he immortalized the attack in a painting "Guernica" which is now considered one of his greatest masterpieces.

Today, news of civilians killed from the air is squeezed in between commercials for beer and the weather report. I notice that no country, it seems, is ever willing to admit that civilians killed in war are their responsibility.

"Collateral damage" used to be the term.

Now, thanks to the ingenuity of an anonymous media spin doctor, we now simply call these things - and accept them as - accidents.

Accidents, accidents, and more accidents.

And sometimes the pseudo-compassionate "tragic accident."

Such strange language.

If I were to walk into a restaurant with the intention of killing my enemy and a dozen innocent people quietly enjoying their dinners were to be killed from stray bullets, would a judge allow me to say those deaths were caused by "accident?"

Even the Mafia, in all its arrogance and brutality, has the decency to avoid "accidents" like these.

Yet governments all over the globe have granted themselves and each other blanket immunity - as long as the ones having the accidents are on "our" side of course.

Now, I can imagine at this point, a few people may be starting to get hot under the collar about what I'm saying.

First, while clearly the current events in Lebanon have triggered me to write this particular letter today, there are many countries at fault in this regard.

Second, while I am not Jewish myself, I have Jewish relatives who are dear to me in the extreme. (Yes, it's possible for someone with the last name "McCarthy" to have Jews in his family. Surprise.)

Because they are so dear to me, I assume there are other human beings in other parts of the world who have people who are dear to them as well.

I assume that the grief I've felt at the death or grave injury of friends and family is not something unique to me, but is the same grief others feel when they lose their loved ones.

How then and under what circumstances would I endorse that kind of pain being inflicted on anybody, especially innocent people?

The answer is I don't and I don't think anyone who has thought this through would either.

We all remember what it meant for a few thousand people to be cut off from food, water, and medical care for just a few days in New Orleans.

Now imagine hundreds of thousands of people cut off not for a few days, but for weeks, running possibly into months.

That's Lebanon today.

The young, the elderly, the handicapped, and others who are not able to get out of the way, will suffer the most.

Many will die - not as the direct result of bombs - but as the entirely predictable outcome of destroyed roads, bridges, airports, ports, power plants, hospitals, and food production facilities

And yet, the scope of the humanitarian catastrophe facing Lebanon is not even news on US TV, let alone a source of outrage.

I'm looking at CNN's web site right now and the three leads stories from the Middle East relate to war operations: bridges being blown up, suburbs bombed, soldiers killed.

Nothing about the scope and scale of the humanitarian catastrophe.

What can we do to help?

Two things:

1. Contribute

One way to help is to support Doctors without Borders.

This is one of the most courageous, effective and ethical relief group I know of.

They routinely bring relief, medical supplies and physicians and nurses into some of the most frightening situations on earth.

They can and will go directly into war zones whether their safety is assured or not - and in Lebanon, where they are now, they have been told that it is not.

Go to their site and read their reports of what they are encountering in Lebanon today:

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/2006/08-03-2006.cfm

2. Think

Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher and inventor, once asked:

"What's the use of a house if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on."

What is the use of all our money making if our world is going down a dark path?

None of the things that are happening today are inevitable, and they are certainly not a product of "human nature."

War is a matter of policy.

It's planned and prepared for. War is complex and expensive and takes as much organization, or more, than running a Fortune 50 corporation.

War is never an "accident" and it certainly isn't a natural force.

Two people in a barroom brawl may be exhibiting the lesser side of human nature, but war is a deliberate product of government intention. It can't be anything else.

If you are an American citizen as I am, think about our country.

How on earth do we or any other country benefit from what's going on in Lebanon today?

The question is important because like it or not we, through our tax dollars, make what's happening in Lebanon financially possible.

And we have the power to stop it.

Because of our role as subsidizer of the Israeli economy - at a cost of $1.3 trillion, yes trillion, to tax US payers since 1949 - we have more than a little influence over that country's actions.

In 1957, President Eisenhower used our influence to stop another war in the Middle East. There's no reason it can't be done again today and thousands, if not tens of thousands of innocent lives, will be saved in the process.

If you agree with this point of view, contact your local Congressman and tell him or her you want the US to use its influence to stop the war now.

Here's the link again for Doctors without Borders:

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/2006/08-03-2006.cfm

Ken McCarthy
www.KenMcCarthy.com
Founder, The SYSTEM Seminar
TheSystemSeminar.com