St. Louis -- A young man from Palestine and another from Israel riveted 400 U.S. military veterans to their seats last week in this city on the Mississippi River.  What captivated the audience was their recent decision to put down the guns they’d pointed at each other for years.    

The two members of Combatants For Peace addressed the mid-August national convention of Veterans For Peace, a 7,000 – member organization dedicated to abolishing war.

Yonaton Gur, a 28 year-old Israeli journalist and Tel Aviv University student spoke first. 

“My grandfather commanded the Israeli Navy during the 1967 war, my father was an officer in Israeli Army Intelligence, and I grew up on a kibbutz.”  But, he explained, “I also grew up in the 90’s, with a more peaceful perspective following the (1993) Oslo Accords.”

Last fall in Jena, the day after two Black high school students sat beneath the "white tree" on their campus, nooses were hung from the tree. When the superintendent dismissed the nooses as a "prank," more Black students sat under the tree in protest. The District Attorney then came to the school accompanied by the town's police and demanded that the students end their protest, telling them, "I can be your best friend or your worst enemy... I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen."

A series of white-on-black incidents of violence followed, and the DA did nothing. But when a white student was beaten up in a schoolyard fight, the DA responded by charging six black students with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

It's a story that reads like one from the Jim Crow era, when judges, lawyers and all-white juries used the justice system to keep blacks in "their place." But it's happening today. The families of these young men are fighting back, but the story has gotten minimal press. Together, we can make sure their story is told and that the Governor of Louisiana intervenes and provides justice for the Jena 6. It starts now:

The Bush administration’s energy policies from 2001 to the present have supported fossil fuels above all other energy sources, emphasizing the need to find new sources of petroleum, support new technologies for liquefied natural gas, and move forward with “clean” coal technologies. Over the course of Bush’s presidency, there is some mixed, but clearly secondary, support for renewable forms of energy and conservation/efficiency.

In a speech on his energy proposals in January, 2007, President Bush seemed to break new ground.  But his calls for reduced U.S. gasoline usage and raising fuel-economy standards are far less than is needed to reduce our growing dependence on oil or stem the rise in greenhouse gases from fossil fuels. One of his featured proposals calls for an increase in the production of corn-based ethanol, but his estimates of the impact seem unrealistic. Steven Mufson, Washington Post correspondent, notes that industry experts say that it would take more than all of last year’s U.S. corn harvest to make enough ethanol to meet Bush’s target of replacing 15 percent of the projected annual gasoline consumption in 2017 (1-24-07).

“The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and benificence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.”

–Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason

Despite the trappings of a civilized culture and the incredibly persistent myth of our moral exceptionalism, we in the United States are collectively a group of mean-spirited, depraved barbarians. Sparing our psyches the pangs of conscience by ferociously devouring the corporate media’s seemingly endless supply of rationalizations, euphemisms, historical revisions, distractions, denials, distortions, and affirmations of our pathological self-absorption, we each carry a degree of responsibility in the infliction of immeasurable unnecessary pain and suffering upon the rest of the Earth’s sentient beings.

Dedicated to the cowardly Democratic Party members whose votes affirmed the Bush administration's unfounded right to illegal searches and seizures and warrantless wiretapping of citizens in the global war on terror:

(sung to the tune of the children's song "This Old Man'')

This Democrat, he caved in
He let Bush swipe our
Civil liberties again

(Refrain)
With a knickknack paddywhack
Give those Dems a bone
This Democrat went limping home

This Democrat, he did, too
First search and seizure
Now eavesdropping, too

With a knickknack paddywhack
Give those Dems a bone
This Democrat went limping home

This Democrat, didn't understand
A congressional majority
Means you have the upper hand

With a knickknack paddywhack
Give those Dems a bone
This Democrat went limping home

This Democrat, he flipped, too
Let Dubya take your library card
And flip FISA, too

With a knickknack paddywhack
Give those Dems a bone
This Democrat went limping home