Senator Kerry was right: 94 brown Texas soldiers have died so far

From my count, 94 brown Texan soldiers have died in Iraq so far because they were uneducated and ambitious. Let's get real, Senator Kerry was right by botching the joke - if our young people had a chance at a good education and a way to go to college, they wouldn't be in Iraq in the first place.

At least 55 of the 94 are from South Texas.

The recruiters and the mainstream media pay attention to our soldiers - making them believe they're special. And they are special, they have dreams, hope, all they want is a chance. But they're being used for the dreams and ambitions of our leaders who don't send their own children to Iraq. Medals, handshakes, thankyous, a little money - that's alot of cheap reward. If our government really believed in these young people, they'd put the real money in education. But that's too expensive, not when the wealthy in this country are getting more taxbreaks.

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Do you know what it's like to lose someone you love? Of course you don't want to even think of it. Well, think about it, because 94 families, mothers, wives, girlfriends, children, relatives, will never be the same again.

Do you know how many men, women and children these soldiers had to kill before they were killed? What will happen to those widows, children, angry brothers and fathers?

And what is heroism, anyway? Remember MLK or Cesar Chavez or the mothers who raised us at personal great sacrifice? How can soldiers be heroes when they don't understand the context of their sacrifice? When they are too young to believe they are mortal?

Senator Kerry was right, if these soldiers understood the political and economic causes of our invasion of Iraq, most of them wouldn't be there.

These uneducated, brainwashed, soldiers, what do they know about global politics and imperialism? Or American hegemony, and our own history of American state-sponsored terrorism in other countries like Chile when we overthrew their democratically elected government on September 11, 1973?

Can our community afford to lose these young people and their potential? When one of them dies, all of us die a little, even if we don't know it. Can we afford the personal and collective loss to their families and to our country?

If we don't stop this war, then we haven't learned the lesson about war, and these soldiers will have certainly, tragically, died in vain.

Photo: Pfc Kristian Menchaca, who was abducted on June 19, 2006 and brutally killed in Iraq. He was from Houston, Texas.