Mijito: You are not a Hero if you go to War

While the news media in San Antonio, Texas - surrounded by four military bases and a complacent, right-wing Catholic Church - continues to dance to the drums of war - it is time for us who lived through Vietnam to tell our mijitas and mijitas that heroism isn't the ability to follow orders and kill people. A hero is someone who has the courage to stand up and confront the monstrous culture of war in this country.

I should have written this story a long time ago, and I'm sorry I didn't. I thought my friends in the media would surely report the protests against the war, interview those of us who question it loudly, survey the leaders who hypocritically support the war while their own children are safely going to college here, report on the way that the military is invading the public schools and last year's national LULAC conference - looking for fresh meat. And I've been searching for the personal, intimate, stories of suffering, whether it's in Iraq, Afghanistan, the occupied territories of Palestine or Lebanon. If the media did this, we would have the freedom, the democracy, those innocent soldiers in Iraq are supposedly dying for.

And you know what? It's not gonna happen. The media in San Antonio is owned by mega-corporations with a big stake in this war, and trust me - their own children are not over there, so the complexity of stories we deserve aren't getting told. The stories we are seeing and reading are to manipulate and silence us so we will continue to deliver our poor and young to this war. The reporters and columnists get to keep their jobs if they remain silent. The businessmen get new federal contracts and the conservative politicians get the most funding to run for office. And the Church? They get crisp soldier's dollars in return for invoking God's blessings to war.

So let me say this loud, proud and brown: We are no better than the terrorists of 9/11 in our fever for war, by causing the sufrimiento, the deaths, and needless trauma of thousands and thousands of innocent people in the middle east. If you want a democracy like I do, tell mijito and mijita that NO, you're not going to war in the name of this empire that devours its jovenes.

Photo Credit: Semblances, by Mark Martinez, Say Si Students, San Antonio, Texas
www.://www..safotofestival.com

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