Is it Caring Or Insanity?

Over the past few years, a small group of Americans have scratched their heads in bewilderment over the lack of mass resistance to the Bush Administration.  When it came to light that torture was being condoned, habeas corpus had been suspended, and the government was spying on its citizens where was the mass public outrage, the protests in the streets, the rising of the masses shouting that "we're mad as Hell and we're not going to take it any more"

I guess Norman Solomon has finally answered our question. 


an excerpt from:

TomPaine.com - Warfare State Is Part of Us

by Norman Solomon, TomPaine.com

August 22, 2007

While trying to understand the essence of what so many Americans have witnessed over the last half century, I worked on a book (titled "Made Love, Got War") that sifts through the last 50 years of the warfare state... and, in the process, through my own life. I haven't learned as much as I would have liked, but some patterns emerged—persistent and pervasive since the middle of the 20th century.

The warfare state doesn't come and go. It can't be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it's at the core of the United States—and it has infiltrated our very being.

What we've tolerated has become part of us. What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward. In the long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, "It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared."

The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.