Our Legacy of Dead and Maimed Children

How deeply this country has sunk into depravity! It is now one of the world’s most egregious jailers, abusers and murderers of children.

Israel, with American military hardware, is raining terror upon the deprived, under-nourished, ill-housed, blockaded, sick and suffering Palestinians in the Gaza.  Nearly 200 have been killed, 30 to 50 of them children.  The kids who survive are not “fortunate;” they suffer the world’s highest rate of childhood post traumatic stress disorder.  Nightmares, attention deficit,  dysfunctional bowels, incoherent thought patterns, intense depression — these are our gifts to the children who survive.

We protect the Israelis with our technology,  with the super power of the most expensive killing machine in history.  The so-called “iron dome” that deflects 90% of the rockets fired at Israel from Gaza is 100% U.S. technology paid for 100% with American tax dollars. The air strike that tore off the arms of a three-year-old Palestinian girl in Khan Younis was conducted by an American plane given to Israel as “foreign aid”, dropping American bombs using sophisticated American guidance systems. So the bomb that killed two invalids in a nursing home, or the one that destroyed a home next to a mosque, may not have been accidents.

In the Americas, Honduras has become a murderous hell-hole in the bloody chaos that followed the American-backed coup d’etat that ousted a democratically-elected head of state.  Most of the children flooding across our border are fleeing the violence in Honduras.  We have incarcerated them in conditions unfit for animals and cannot wait to throw them back to the hell from which they fled — a hell that we created. They are refugees but we call them illegal immigrants. 

Coalitions of religious, civil liberties, human rights, medical, legal and labor organizations have documented these horrors and demanded an end to them, but our government simply growls at these frightened kids and the many others who might follow them across the border, “We will send you back.”

We slaughtered a million and a half Iraqis bringing “freedom and democracy” to that benighted land.  How many of them were children?  Far, far too many in the view of any but the most barbarian of cultures. Not to mention the maimed and traumatized and parentless children who huddle in the rubble of their devastated country, lacking potable water, adequate medical treatment or proper nutrition.  This is their “gift of freedom” from the United States of Endless War. Unindicted war criminals like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Perle still boast about “achievements” there, just as Netanyahu’s  toadies boast of their “achievements” in Palestine. How many dead and maimed children constitute an “achievement?”

We financed and trained the neo-Nazis who drove another democratically-elected head of state  out of office in Ukraine, where our foreign policy has created a new hell-hole of civil war, death and destruction.  Of course children are among the victims.  We don’t know how many.  We don’t care.

How many dead and crippled children did we leave in Libya?  How many children have our drones killed? 

In our own country, more than 16 million children live in poverty, lacking adequate food, housing, medical care and education.  We cannot afford government programs to feed them, to improve their schools, to give them a ray of hope, but we can afford trillions for the war machine that turns children into collateral damage.

A majority of United States citizens purport to be Christians.  Perhaps they follow some Christ , but not the one who said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me . . . .”