Home > Please Don’t Go Back to Sleep
Wars and conflicts International USA
Dear America: I am longing to reach you — crossing this river of indifference and consumption and denial. I am trying to find you, reaching out through the desperate limitations of words and descriptions, swimming through the rhetoric of terror and God.
I need you to wake up. The house is on fire and you are still sleeping, lulled by the intoxication of smoke and mirrors. I need you to wake up and I know that shaking you, scaring you will only make you cling to your sleep and sleep more.
How then do I tell you what’s going on? How do I tell you about the one hundred thousand dead Iraqi people that you and I are responsible for murdering. Each one of them valued their life, longed for their morning, cherished their first cup of milk or coffee or tea. In what way shall I deliver what I learned? The substance identical to illegal napalm that melted tender five year old skin; the cluster bombs that have left their murderous and disguised offspring, throngs of bomblets set to explode, scattered on the Iraqi earth; the depleted uraninum from the Bunker Busters we dropped that now lives in lungs and livers and soil.
How do I tell you about the strategic planning of such atrocities in the boardrooms, the backrooms, the back seats of limos, the organized take over and looting of Iraq right out from under the terrorized, hungry, thirsty Iraqi people. How do I get you to listen to the stories of our soldiers who are trying to kill themselves now, longing to escape the madness of murdering and maiming for no reason.
Please don’t go back to sleep. I know how hard it is to hear of the massive black holes, called prisons we have dug to hold thousands without charging them, without trials or the torture, the meanness, the cruelty we are inflicting upon them.
America, those who now control our country have changed and ended law. I do not believe you are so calloused or selfish that you do not care. Your sleep is induced. You are distracted and derailed. The corporations have concocted and perfected these sleeping potions for years, developing ingredients to make you despise every bit of yourself, to feel ugly and fat and stupid and poor and not enough. And so you spend your time and every bit of the money you do not have buying products that will make you better, skinnier, lighter, whiter, tighter. And as you consume and consume, the corporations consume you. They take your money and your time and your voice and your instincts and your outrage and your sorrow and your anger and your grief. They consume your courage and leave fear in its place. They devour your conscience and your memory and your compassion.
And how do I speak when they are sure to tie my tongue? When they will say I do not love my country or support the troops or honor the dead or believe in their God? How do I break through your sealed wrapping, your self-obsession, your TVheadphonedDVDcell pod?
America I am getting desperate and I know this will not get me published or heard. Those who control the information will say I’m extreme, that I’ve gone mad. But I have heard the cries of children in the exploding houses of Falluja. I have seen the agonized faces of the sleepless Iraqi women who still clutch the outline of their charred dead babies in their arms. I have watched as we as a nation grow more isolated, despised and alone.
America, there is not much time left. The fire is spreading, consuming the world. We are the arsonists. We will need each other to find our way out through the lies and haze. It will take our greatest imagination, courage and skill to subdue these flames.
This letter was written immediately after The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul where I served with thirteen others from around the world on a jury chaired by Arundhati Roy. The Tribunal consisted of three days of hearings investigating various issues related to the war on Iraq, such as the legality of the war, the role of the United Nations, war crimes and the role of the media, as well as the destruction of the cultural sites and the environment. The session in Istanbul was the culminating session of commissions of inquiry and hearings held around the world over the past two years.
Forum posts
10 July 2005, 06:27
Don’t you get it: Iraqi don’t suffer if they are killed by American freedomizers!
It’s just that their lifes don’t count.
10 July 2005, 08:02
That which you speak of is a phenomenon I have been observing and studying for 25 years. In my time alive and aware of it I have witnessed a slow and ever methodical psychologcial parametric indoctrination into a actual cult of self denial, psycho hynotic self humilitation about a constructed self image of consuming to overcome psychic suggestions placed their by corporated advertising, fashion image industries, and body obsessive sex body worshiping male oriented racially biased and sexually indifferent to empathetic relationship models, centering on the psychic building of emotional models of impulse behaviors driven by sex, power, and social acceptance based on possession sematics propagate as a mental illness into a pathological state of FEAR created by the reverse impulses created in advertising and media.
This very engine designed to make us desire products to feed the "life style" religion of worship the self empty ego based on money oriented value perceptions is dangerous as we have developed into creatures that are not really socially connected as humans but as product consumers identifing not with people BASED on NEEDS or CARE BONDING but on our social status with image imprinted consumer groups that we identify with because of the types and costs of the products we consume.
In this way shopping, purchasing and using in view of others (vanity usage), and communicating in our conversations with peer people based on the product groups depending on income group we fit in have in fact been mind controlled into accepting this as WHAT corporations have defined as a consumer culture, which spends and desires because of advertisment imprinting products and purchased life experience model. In this way our indiginous values and people based empathies have been suplanted, replaced, and REFINED FOR US by corporations. We are a proudct of creating war because our consumer oriented mind control culture has led us to create greater consumsion BECAUSE OF THE DESIRE OF INVESTMENT PROFIT, we have in fact mind raped ourselves, our culture and humanity and have left ourselves be RAPED EMOTIONAL, RAPED PSYCHOLOGICAL, and RAPED social interactions define a new kind of self serving IDEALESS person who only worships SELF GRATIFYING EXPERIENCES of PLEASANTRIES over any other type of human behavior as such we are in fact DEAD to the rest of the actual world that has a CULTURAL BASIS. We as consumers have no culture we a target markets of consuming image consious mind programmed through advertising and media to not ACT as THINKING PEOPLE acting with goals of higher intented purposes among group settings; instead we are lost in a psychic hypnotic state of distraction of products, images, and implied relationships based on what WE BOUGHT, not on WHO WE ARE BECOMING SOCIALLY OR in the GREATER HUMAN FAMILY, but have been tought to FOLLOW suggestions of WHAT WE SHOULD be like, to enable the profitable economic exchange for the sake of creating life experiences BASED ON PURCHASE of PRODUCTS MADE BY OTHER EXPLOITED RACES, CULTURES, and GOVERNMENTS all for the SAKE of the CORPORATION INVESTMENT OWNERS.
This is why we are ill. We continue to accept, practice, and condone such consumerism driven by the investment banking agendas which one small group will provide money to a region in exchange for converting their indigenous culture into the slave culture of the modern capitalist polic-state protect corporation controlled and driven government and media oligarchic controllers. The reason that it iS STILL IN EXISTENCE is becuase we have been indoctrinated to follow leaders and to order our behaviors not around factual and humanly empathic experience bahvior shapping, but by defining a FEAR oritned consumer culture that is INDOCTRINATED TO BELIEVE WE SHOULD FOLLOW LEADERS. We should not. We should communicate. Discuss issues. Define workable social agendas and develope a culture not on following dominent leaders but on following IDEAS and COMMON values of human communication based on truth and peace, as such replacing the decieving Babylonian style slave trading economic systems of personal GREED development.
To change the world first we must teach people how to change themselves to define a lifes purpose based on shared values and stop looking at ourselves in the labels of mind control like our race, religions, governmental propaganda systems, skin color and a host of other things that are the needed pretext to enable the mind controlling slave control techniques by creating voilent pretexts of biased beliefs which ARE THE FOUNDATION of failure in our system.
peace out b7
11 July 2005, 06:17
Sorry, we Whites do not hear you; don’t have to hear you. Do not need you.
Oh, and please get off the planet...
29 July 2005, 09:43
You are a classic rasist fellow so please go back to your sleep, he-he, no solution for you, you are tv brainwashed.
See ya in Hell
11 July 2005, 21:04
See also:
– The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing World Tribunal on Iraq
– Wake up Calls (+ links)
– World Tribunal on Iraq