[Vision2020] CNN Breaking News

[Melynda Huskey]

Five children under five years of age were killed in that van.  Five babies 
and children that I'd like to believe Don Kaag didn't intend to include in 
the obscene phrase "not a major loss to the gene pool."

What I find so painfully horrific about this situation, which will multiply 
across Iraq as the war continues, is the destruction of everyone touched by 
it.  Those children are dead.  A pregnant woman was wounded but survived.  A 
man was seriously wounded and is expected to die.  None of them was armed.

And a group of very young soldiers--the average age of U.S. soldiers in this 
war is 19--will never recover from what they were forced by circumstance to 
do.   They will live with the blood of children on their hands.  What did 
they do to deserve that?  What rhetoric of liberation, or "support for the 
troops" can heal them?  Their humanity has been crushed, and they are as 
innocent as those dead children.

The shame of this war rests on all of us:  it's our war.  We invaded Iraq in 
pursuit of--what?  Peace?  Liberation?  Oil?  I don't know.  Whatever it 
was, it wasn't worth the brief agony of those children or the lifelong 
suffering of those soldiers.  It wasn't worth the dehumanization that makes 
it possible for anyone here at home to dismiss their pain as "too bad" for 
them.

Melynda Huskey

"We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward 
weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever: this is our 
testimony to the whole world."
Quaker Declaration of 1660



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