American Views Abroad

 
Having spent last weekend in Potsdam where the heart of the city was bombed out two weeks before the end of WW II and some time at the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin which brought out in me a feeling of emptiness for all the lives lost, trampled over in a most horrible way, and how generations after that have to deal with it, I realized I didn't even want to read a Sunday newspaper or follow what was happening with the whole Newsweek episode. First there was the British Smoking Gun Memo and now this-----so where is the surprise here? Instead, I was intrigued by the young children at the memorial who saw the stones and the waves of paths as something to touch and climb on. There was a chubby boy who started rolling from one to the other, on and off, in these days getting some much needed exercise and smiling through it all. There were groups standing around stones, talking away. I was reminded of a Mexican day where the families go to the graves to eat and talk and think about the dead. The stones which were not lined up in single file reminded me of the old Jewish cemetery in Prague.

Yet, reality struck back and Molly Ivins has a column we Americans have to read. Her last paragraph reads:

Get you minds around it. Our country is guilty of torture. To quote myself once more: 'What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own this country, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elected to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them.'

Read it at www.commondreams.org/views05/0517-34.htm.
- posted by Gloria @ 6:40 PM