A WAR? REALLY?
A war is when both people get shot at. Where only one person is shooting, it's called an assault. Assaults have victims; they are the people being shot at. One should be able to look at something and realize what it is. If one can not do that, one needs assistance in either seeing or understanding what one is seeing.
The war with Iran is not a war; it is an assault. We are bombing and killing Iranians. Now I am not a fan of Iran. I would not want to live there and I do not condone how they treat their women. But the fact that I am not a fan of Iran and I do not like the way they treat their women does not affect either my eyesight or my understanding of what we are doing there. We are assaulting them and in so doing killing many.
Our national media, our local media, our media everywhere I turn is calling our current situation with the Iranians a war. It is not. We Americans are not in harm's way. We Americans are going about our business as usual every day unencumbered by Iranian missiles or bombs or other destructive devices making our lives inconvenient. We are not bothered by such things as lack of gas, or rubble where our work place was yesterday, or other such nuisances.
We are once again subject to a failure of understanding because we have a failure of language. Nothing illustrates our lack of understanding better than the use of our language to describe what is happening in Iran. We are killing Iranians. We are also killing people in boats in the Pacific Ocean, not interdicting drug dealers. We killed people in Venezuela when we kidnapped its president. The government of the United States is going around the world killing people. What is it about this that we are missing? Is it that we misunderstand because of the way these things are being described or do we simply not care. I do not like to think of it as not caring. For if we do not care, we as a country, lose any moral standing we may have had anywhere.
We are not engaged in war, we are committing assaults, some deadly. And to add to this, we are treating the people we find in this country working, raising families, paying taxes horribly by simply disappearing them and by so doing, leaving families, jobs, friends, homes they have established over years of living here peacefully and productively. One day they are simply gone.
One can not dispute the fact that our government, the government of the United States, is assaulting, killing, and disappearing people and it is our government, not someone else's government, but ours - yours and mine. It would seem to me that this should be of some concern; it certainly is to me.
Richard E H Phelps II
Mingo
