Jul 14 2007

Questions of Empire

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us soldier

By Adam Engel

7-14-07

What to you do if you’re a minority and “everyone” hates you? What if you realize that lots of people like or even love you, actually, but none of them are ever on TV? And the TV was the one that told you that you were a minority and everyone hated you in the first place?

What if your country were not the land of opportunity, merely of opportunists?

What if you had not an enemy in the world capable of harming you, and a trillion dollars to spend on housing, schools, hospitals, transportation, and most important of all, preventing as best as possible the dire consequences of a compromised environment?

What if “The Environment” were just the green fields and mountains and stuff you know from postcards, ads, and TV, but have never actually experienced with your other four senses?

What if someone lied to you in order to prevent you from spending the trillion dollars on the aforementioned public necessities so they could spend it on a war against a foreign country which had neither ability nor intention of ever attacking you, but who did harbor a great supply of the oil that is destroying your planet?

What if someone told you that the war was of immediate necessity because the Enemy harbored weapons of mass destruction (just like your country and its “allies.”)?

What if thousands of your “countrymen” were wounded, dying, or dead?

What if hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of The Enemy’s children had been killed by bullet or embargo, thousands killed daily or dying in barren hospitals since your daughter, now in college, was born?

How come the number of offenses by Corporate/Military/Political elites against the people outside the Nation and the Nation’s own people cannot be counted by mere men in time, but like the fractal, must undergo millions of iterations by computer, to reach completion?

Why are people dying of cancer in the street, or if not on the street in hospitals or homes and why is everyone always dying of cancer?

Why won’t the Nation treat its cancerized citizens who don’t have health insurance?

Why is the “National Institute of Health” (NIH) taking government money to do research to create drugs that will be sold back to the taxpayer at exorbitant prices? Is there a “National Free Clinic?” Is there a “National Free Aspirin?”

Why is my friend dying because he doesn’t have health insurance? Why am I dying because I don’t have health insurance?

Is that why the Indians died, because they didn’t have health insurance? Is that how Lincoln died?

If we’re the “good guys,” why does everyone want to kill us? Are we lone cowboys like Gary Cooper and John Wayne?

What if all these questions were asked of a ten-year-old, the age at which, it seems, the Modern American Mind closes, shutting down all alternatives to racism, corporatism, imperialism, and savage, restless violence?

How many questions about America are there? Enough to fill every database on the Internet?

Adam Engel can be reached at

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2 Responses to “Questions of Empire”

  1. Paul D.on 16 Jul 2007 at 7:00 am

    It’s seems the “MO” of empires is that the majority of people living behind the castle walls don’t seem to ask the right questions, or care to.

    God Bless the Media.

  2. Khazeemon 19 Jul 2007 at 3:56 pm

    Great article and follow up.

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