The Thoughtlessly Cruel America the World Sees - a Holiday Story for Our Times

posted by Bill Arnett @ 11:59 AM Permalink

Because of the ridiculous jibber-jabber that passes for news reading in the world today, most Americans do not understand why we are becoming so universally despised.

A case in point: a young Iraqi boy, who shall remain nameless here, was horribly burned after a gang of thugs poured gasoline over his head and lit him ablaze. A group of caring citizens, or at least people working within the bush propaganda machine, banded together to bring the boy and his mother here to America to provide surgical and medical care to try and give the boy a better life, less disfigured, suffering less physical pain, and, hopefully, less mental anguish. A real, feel good story.

After each surgical procedure the boy and his mother will be paraded on national television showing the boy playing with other children, laughing, his mother, beaming with love and gratitude thanking the reporters (as if they had anything to do with it) in her broken english, a smile beaming from her face, and the entire story will be retold each time.

Yes, sir, a real, old-fashioned, American-style brand of compassion that will warm our hearts, bring a tear to our eye, and remind each of us just what a wonderful country in which we live that we can be so generous and helpful to this family. It would not surprise me at all to see the boy and his mother sitting next to laura during the next State of the Union speech, bush pointing them out with pride as a symbol of American generosity and compassion, the poor woman and her son will stand and wave to America, smiling; the perfect props to demonstrate how kind is the president and how good is America.

And it's all bull$hit on a silver platter with a hugh dose of hubris and chutzpah, a typical American P.R. story meant to reassure Americans and the world just how terrific it is that America can be so generous to a child from another land who has suffered so horribly, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars treating this one child just a few scant months after bush denied even the faintest bit of medical care or insurance to tens of millions of American children.

No mention will be made during this coming Christmas week of those ten million or more children who themselves, along with their families, are just one brief illness away from devastating the family's finances, losing their homes, begging welfare and charitable organizations for services and help those agencies can no longer provide due to overwhelming demand, and a public so swamped with debt that they can contribute no more. There will be no news stories about the poor and infirm that must choose between eating, heating their homes, buying medicine for themselves or family, or who must watch as their children grow so ill that they must, at last, take the child, or themselves, to an Emergency Room for the very most expensive form of medical care.

There will be barely a mention of the children and families suffering brutal winter cold because it is more important for the oil companies to make their profits than to care for the people to whom the oil will be sold. Once again there will be only one oil company that will give away hundreds of thousands of gallons of free or very low cost oil up in our cold northeastern climes, and in what should be the shame of American, our Big Oil will not be those who give this help, but Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Citgo Oil, who will be the compassionate one, helping the poor and infirm in a country that despises, vilifies, demonizes, and threatens Chavez at every opportunity.

There will be hardly any talk of the millions of American children, living in what is supposed to be the richest and most powerful country in the world, who will be going to bed hungry in larger numbers than ever before or their parents who will be losing their houses in record numbers while our government will be busy bailing out the real estate billionaires and bankers of our society with nary a thought towards the people whom they purport to serve.

Lastly, for now, comes the ultimate hypocrisy, our greatest shame, and one of which you are certain to not hear addressed at all by American media: America has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and their mothers and fathers while committing a systematic genocide of the Iraqi people just so we may satiate our thirst for the oil under their sands.

America has laid waste to every structure of government and most physical structures in Iraq with the singular exception of those structures that aid the oil industry and those magnificent palaces Saddam built, now occupied by American forces.

We have caused one of the greatest humanitarian disasters the world has seen, driving over two million Iraqi children and women out of Iraq to suffer the slings and arrows of fate in countries other than their own, countries which do not view these Iraqis as anything but a border and refugee problem, making them live in tent cities constructed to provide minimal shelter and caring not at all whether they have the means and resources to feed and care for themselves and their children. How many tens and tens of thousands of children has America killed in this way?

Over two-and-a-half million more Iraqis have had their homes destroyed, their lands taken over by occupying forces, and have been internally displaced by Americans who, again, do not give a damn how many more thousands and thousands of children and women die, either as "collateral damage," or from illness and starvation caused by being uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven out into the barren deserts of Iraq to suffer misery right up to the very moment they die.

But we have helped a single child, horribly disfigured, and so, America is once again, in our eyes, a kind and compassionate country. The richest and most generous in the world. A paragon of virtue and the shining light of democracy.

I no longer participate in the mass delusion that there will be "peace on earth and goodwill towards men," brought about by celebrating the birth of another child, worshipping that child, supposedly born over 2,000 years ago in the same region of the world in which we are now conducting eternal warfare, putting up crass displays of commercialism and the expression of empty slogans which, at least here in America, have become too trite for description. But for those that do not recognize the unmitigated gall and hypocrisy of helping a single burned child, and celebrating the long-ago birth of another, and then claiming to be good "Christians" while we continue the American-sponsored killing of children and finishing our genocide in Iraq, well…

Merry Christmas.

Labels: casualties, Iraq war, MSM