• Silver City
• Albuquerque
• Los Alamos
• Santa Fe
• Taos

Shock & Awe
5 Years Later

On this same day in 2008, a vigil was held in Silver City, like others in hundreds of cities and towns across the country.  There were few signs, no shouting, and what was said was punctuated by silences as we contemplated our future in a country that has been plunged into an abyss.

On 19 Mars 2003 the United States initiated a military assault on Baghdad which - invoking Concord in 1776 with the slavish complicity of US MSM / Main Stream Media -  was seen around the world.  But unlike that first shot of the American Revolution, this war of aggression marked not the birth of a new democracy, but the commitment to a new degree of imperial criminality and a level of violence and destruction that will make the Bush administration and the United States government one of the bloodiest in the world and most despised in modern history after reducing much of Iraq to rubble and leaving 1 million or more Iraqis dead.

This gathering in Silver City was organized by Gila Friends Meeting and Pax Christi /Silver City - two religious organizations with a strong affinity for the social justice aspects of  Christ's teachings.  American Friends Service Committee compiled the info in the short presentation that prefaces the vigil and have an historic role as defenders of the oppressed and vocal opponents to war in three centuries.  As their name suggests, Pax Christi is an international organization with many local chapters that has similarly committed to the teachings of peace.  How strange that the Vatican and other major religions cannot bring themselves to require their members to "study war no more."

The protests preceding the invasion  - with participants numbering in the millions in hundreds of cities around the world - were of no consequence to the Bush/Blair axis, nor the extensive reporting, commentary and analysis from the alternative media which already identified many of the crimes to come as civil liberties were eroded, international agreements abrogated, and international bodies such as the UN and International Criminal Courts were undermined.  With Bush in his final days, many have eschewed public protest while working, or just hoping, for change.  But some among us continue to remember and raise our voices, even softly.

Click here to watch or here to listen.