Most of my career as a writer was spent spinning what other people wanted to communicate into more clear and engaging prose. My biggest challenge always was to get those people to define what they really meant by terms that they used that I was expected to incorporate into whatever I spun. Lots of people use the word

No, that’s not an affirmation. That’s an accusation. America is continually proving just what a bully we are.
….. thousands of Iraqis protested that they did not need American help now Saddam Hussein had gone. “No to America, No to Saddam,” chanted Iraqis from the Shia Muslim majority long oppressed by Saddam, who is from the rival Sunni sect. Arabic television networks said up to 20,000 people marched.
At talks that began after a delay, skepticism ran deep among groups united by little more than joy at Saddam’s fall and unease at getting too close to Washington.
But are our leaders listening? Of course not.
Speaking of listening to people that should (or shouldn’t) be listened to, myrln reminds us:
If Paula Zahn is a journalist (a wholly unsubstantiated assumption, I know) rather than an informal Israeli cheerleader, then why doesn’t she insist that an Israeli minister (preferably Sharon himself) be booked on the show to answer the same questions she put to the Syrian minister today? Her bias is always evident, and it diminishes CNN’s already questionable credibility.
Perhaps she could also ask if it’s true Israel is looking for an oil pipeline from Iraq which must route through Syria, and how much that influenced the US invasion of Iraq and the current accusations against Syria. Oh, wait, you can’t do that because the invasion wasn’t about oil. Dubya said so, and you guys believed him.
Oh yes, bully, bully for us:
At least 10 people were shot dead and scores wounded in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, a hospital doctor said, with witnesses claiming US troops had opened fire on a crowd after it turned against an American-installed local governor.

By the time a post has more than 10 Comments, the only people reading them are the ones who are adding theirs to the others. Yet, I find that some of my writing that states my positions most clearly are the ones I put in my Comments. I think it has to do with the fact that Comments become real conversations. Not real-time conversations, but thoughtful exchanges nonetheless. So, I’m repeating here some of what I wrote as Comments here:
Using [Jessica] Lynch as some kind of catalyst for a discussion of violence toward women on the home front was a bit of a stretch. I see her more as a victim of our military system, which promises a better life for those who serve. Except first, they have to survive the service itself, and that’s the part that’s not empahsized enough.
The older I get, the more I realize that everything in life is a trade-off. You have to be careful to make sure that you understand what you’re trading off for what you think you’re going to get.
….we make our choices and we take our chances when it comes to women joining the military. (I wonder, though, how many women in the military really thought through the choice they were making.) There’s a lot of cultural conditioning that gets in the way of letting us do our jobs no matter what our jobs are. We’re often damned if we do and damned if we don’t. And the men who work with us (on and off the battlefield) often make it harder on themselves as well as us because they don’t know how to get past that cultural conditioning. (And, as I’ve said before — much to the annoyance of both males and females I know — they don’t know how to control their testosterone surges.)
So, my choice is just about always to go where I’m not expected to play by the rules that have been set up by men primarily. I just don’t expect them to really understand how I think, make decisions, get things done. If, by chance, they do, terrific. That means we’ll work well together because I’ll go out of my way to try to meet them half-way. Now, none of that would hold true in the military. It’s a man’s game all the way.
I operate from the perspective that males and females are equal but different. We are of equal value as humans and have the same potential to succeed as far as brain-power is concerned. We might work out problems using different thought and interpersonal processes, but our solutions to those problems will be just as exquisitely forumulated as those of men. Different, maybe, but just as valid, just as deliberate, just as well-constructed.
In general, we don’t have the level of brute physical strength that men have, and if we choose to give birth, we have the constraints of our biology. But those are — or at least they should be — minor obstacles to success in just about any area of intelligent human activity. Except, I think, the military. It’s really beyond me why any female would honestly want to be a part of all that phoney baloney machismo. It’s not that I don’t think we need a military, but it has to evolve into a horse of different color before I would consider it worth riding on into the sunset.

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood. I want to go out and take a walk. But I check my email first and start checking out the sites that my anti-war email pals are telling me about. I should get out and get some fresh air. But this stupid war…the stupidity of the stupid men waging this stupid war — holds me here at the keyboard, seething instead of sunning.
The truth is, I don’t want to hide in the sun. I want to keep shouting into the wind — which is what this blogging is, I know. But it’s war. It’s a war against everything I hope for and believe in. I’m not going to hide.
What I’m going to do is point you to some truths that need to be more broadly known, and they’re not being broadcast, at least not the way they should be.
Example 1:
Yesterday, Lawrence Eagleburger, who was US Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., told the BBC:
“If George Bush [Jr.] decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about 15 minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can’t get away with that sort of thing in this democracy.”
The above quote is taken from a report on BBC television, but has so far not appeared on their Website. The quote is mentioned near the bottom of an article in today’s Independent. It is also referenced in today’s Mirror and Pakistan Tribune.
Example 2:
In the second of his dispatches from the million-dollar media centre at Qatar, Michael Wolff recounts how he angered the US right
Wolff:
But I was not a war reporter. I did not have to observe war-time propriety, or cool. I was free to ask publicly (on international television, at that) the question everyone was asking of each other: “I mean no disrespect, but what is the value proposition of these briefings. Why are we here? Why should we stay? What’s the value of what we’re learning at this million dollar press centre?”
What happens to him could have been taken right out of a movie script (except is was for real), including:
The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform – making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): “I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” And: “A lot of people don’t like you.” And then: “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” And too: “This is fucking war, asshole.” And finally: “No more questions for you.”
Example 3:
An emailed essay from a Daniel Patrick Welch, who points to this site, is a lengthy piece that pretty much covers everything I believe, but stated in a much more reader-friendly prose than mine usually is, including this:
And what is all this focus on civilian dead? I mean it’s horrific, of course–it’s the whole ball of wax, really. But soldiers aren’t people? When the tables are turned, the U.S. screams bloody murder if one of our boys is killed, TV up close and personals, etc. Enemy soldiers don’t have mothers? They can be blithely incinerated from 40,000 feet by fuel-air bombs and other weapons more horrific than anything currently banned–international law, thankfully for the Americans, hasn’t had time to catch up to the technology. I guess that undermining, bribing, and threatening pays off. Bush and Rumsfeld (dubbed Chemical Donald by a British columnist) even insist that we have the right to use nuclear weapons, or other gases only allowed for domestic crowd control.
and this:
The Stupidity Factor doesn’t appear to be evaporating any time soon. Many Americans are perfectly happy to have a “president” who is no smarter than they are–it’s not threatening unless you get on his bad side. …. I used to think that the monopoly corporations who funded Bush’s rise to power had picked wrong–and it may still be shown that they overplayed their hand. But my cynicism and despair have deepened in the past few months. What a coup (pun intended) to have picked a true idiot, a mean, drunken frat boy who does what he’s told and then some, sticking to it like a rabid pit bull.
And then there’s this eloquent and moving right-on-the-money piece by a mom whose daughter was arrrested for protesting:
Don’t all parents want the world for their children? Fellow parents, tell me, wouldn’t we do anything for them? To give them big houses, we will cut ancient forests. To give them the best education, we will invest in companies that profit from death.
To keep them safe, we will deny them the right to privacy, to travel unimpeded, to peacefully assemble. And to give them peace, we will kill other people’s children or send them to be killed and amass enough weapons to kill the children again, kill them 20 times if necessary.
We would do anything for our children but the one big thing: Stop and ask ourselves, what are we doing and allowing to be done? Frank and I go busily about, buying this or that, voting or not — on a small scale, in the short term, making things work for our children — forgetting that whatever is left of the world is the place where they will have to live.
What will our grandchildren say? I think I can guess:
How could you not have known? What more evidence did you need that your lives, your comfortable lives, would do so much damage to ours?
Did you think you could wage war against nations without waging war against people and against the land? Didn’t you wonder what we would drink, once you poisoned the aquifers? Didn’t you wonder what we would breathe, once you poisoned the air? Did you stop to ask how we would be safe, in a world poisoned by war?
I’m thinking about how I will answer those questions when my grandson is old enough to ask me. I will think about that as I go outside to walk among the long afternoon shadows.

In the new park that the town is building next door to where I live, there are signs around the little lake that say “Keep away. Treated with Canada Geese deterrent.”
So, instead, the geese — along with flocks of sea gulls (sea gulls??) — are gathering around the large areas of the grassy park land that have flooded because they weren

In America, we say that we should respect/honor/enable diversity

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary,