A Moment of Screaming, Please

As I started my almost weekly drive from Austin to Houston this afternoon, the classical radio station (KMFA) was finishing Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, From the New World. After that, the announcer came on and said that on the occasion of Memorial Day, the station would join its listeners in a minute of silence to honor the servicemen and -women who had died. Silence dutifully followed.

I don't know about you, but while I am tremendously saddened by the lost of those young lives, and I am as ready as the next person to honor their memory, the last thing that comes to mind as a reaction to the current war, which has so far cost more than 4,000 such lives, is silence. In fact, what I want to do when I think of that war is scream. I want to scream to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld (wherever the last two are now hiding in deserved disgrace): I know you didn't fire the bullets or arm the IEDs that killed these people, but you manufactured the conflict in which they were killed. You are thus complicit in their deaths. And the memory of these poor people is not well served by silence, it is better served by an outcry -- hopefully an outcry that will continue until November 4, Election Day, so that you are not succeeded by more of the same.

On the same drive a week earlier, I heard a reading from the book "War Wounds: a Father and Son Return to Vietnam" by Tom Bissell. One quote struck me, so I sent a text message to my own email address in order to remember to look it up, and I now have it as one of my email signatures, ready to be used for the right audience:
"War, when necessary, is unspeakable. When unnecessary, it is unforgivable."