April 18, 2008 at 09:06:01

The "War on Terror" is also a war on us

by Cheryl Abraham

http://www.opednews.com

I must confess, my brain, my heart, and my conscience are on ‘overload.’ Every day I am bombarded with the latest outrage, the latest sad and sick news, the latest abomination created, controlled, manufactured, and contributed for and by the Bush regime. My levels of anger, frustration, anxiety, fear and worry are at an all time high. My sense of injustice is so raw at this point that the daily trip into this zone is a painful adrenaline ride. Many days I feel as if I am in a battle zone, the Bush regime’s war on terror is also waging a war on my sanity and on my life, but then I see the pictures and read the stories of the suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of the U.S. military and their own people and this sobers me up from that self absorbed thought, so do the stories of the vets from Winter Soldier testimonies, as if I have anything to complain about, as if almost anything in my life I am experiencing could quantify as terror.

It is not as if I am a hapless victim of this overwhelming amount of ‘terrifying’ information. I choose to listen daily to AirAmerica radio, I choose to rent and watch documentaries sure to make my blood pressure rise, and I choose to go to my computer as much as I can throughout the day, read vast amounts of articles and commentaries, and then double check the information when I have time, and even when I don’t have the time, (which tends to create conflicts in other facets of my life). No one is forcing me to do these things. I do them all under the power of my own free will. I frequently and daily pass on the information that I think worthy, often to the annoyance of those on my email lists. I also watch mainstream media just to see what it misses instead of what it informs me of. I get my cynical rocks off watching the inane, redundant, stupefying junk that the news media passes off as ‘information’. It is fully within my own personal power to ‘turn off’ and turn away from the reality we all face.



Many people I know choose to turn off, they adhere to Thomas Gray’s advice, “Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise,â€