Common Sense

Anyone who knows me knows I cannot abide hippies for very long. There’s just something about them that ticks me off. But, I must congregate amongst them from time to time because our political views tend to mesh.

So it was Saturday. While driving in the freshly fallen snow, CommonSenseMom saw something you don’t see everyday driving home from the grocery store: A truck with a casket in the bed.

Luckily, we had just gotten a new digital camera and she was eager to try it out.

My mom is such a photojournalist. She enjoys going to political events with me in order to capture the moment on film. She went to Crawford one Thanksgiving to meet Cindy Sheehan at a memorial dedication and who can forget the time I sent her as a roving reporter when the Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow brought us Fahrenheit 9/11 in Crawford.

I stil have the “No Moore: Bush 2004″ t-shirt she bought me then. Everytime I wear it though, no one gets that I’m being cleverly ironic.

Anyway, I had to get up and put on pants and make my way through the snow drifts to see hippies communing at the Sons of Herman Hall in McGregor for what I could only assume was a sit in or something.

Lo and behold, Cindy Sheehan was supposedly back in order to give President Bush and Easter basket. Several peace movement groups were also meeting to discuss successes and plans. Not all were hippies, amazingly enough.

My mom enjoys meeting these people. “They believe what I believe,” she told me afterward. Whether it was Tina Richards talking about her work in D.C. or the casket in the parking lot, all these people have a powerful message that people have begun to heed. More and more people everyday have questioned this war in Iraq and these are the people, these hippies, that were doing the questioning all along.

Even when major newspapers were ignoring their record-breaking protest marches, these people didn’t stop asking the important question: Why are we in Iraq?

They didn’t buy the weapons of mass destruction argument from the beginning, they knew that there was no al Qaeda link between them and Saddam (they, in fact, avoided killing Zarqawi to try and preserve the causus belli for war) and it only took a cursory glance at our foreign policy to realize ‘democracy promotion’ was a sham. They were right all along and still they are marginalized by most of us. There’s something tragic about that.

The vanguard of the truth is shunned by those so easily deceived. It’s almost as if the greater public is resentful that they won’t lie to them. That the lie had to be exposed because the lie made them feel righteous. When lies are righteous and the truth is resented, only evil thrives.

I think the thing that affected her the most was the coffin in the parking lot. A man had brought the casket of his son, draped in a flag and surrounded by all of his things to be viewed. Lance Corp. Alexander Arredondo of Boston, Mass. in the United State Marine Corps. was killed in action during his second tour of Iraq. He died August 25, 2004 in Najaf, just 20 days after his 20th birthday.

His father travels with a casket in the bed of his truck, draped in the flag that the USMC gave him “on behalf of a grateful nation.” How grateful can that nation be when they re-elected the man who sent him to Najaf to die just a few months later. The man that lied through his teeth to send him and more than 3,200 other American soldiers to their deaths. The man who still continues to lie. To deceive, inveigle and obfuscate to preserve his own power and continue his selfishness unabated. It’s almost enough to make me vomit.

This war has been one of the biggest mistakes we’ve ever made as a country, but somehow, we haven’t bothered to stop making it. Too many people are being sacrificed to make the lie feel righteous when it is anything but.