Everyone here at S.I. knows me by now so you wont be surprised that I think gun control is dangerous to a citizenry.
That warring on countries without Congressional approval is unconstitutional (no one seems to care about the constitution anymore although as a Congressional candidate last year I had to sign an oath to uphold the Constitution so I assume everyone in office did too).
That the U.S. Federal government has gotton too big, powerful, overspending and is willing to bully any country any time.
That our boarders are not threatened and so we have no right warring.
Look at these:
From: Laura Mildon <maddog@buster.com>
Date: Thursday, April 01, 1999 11:16 AM
Subject: Letters from Serbia
Letters From Serbia
I am in NO WAY an authority to fully describe what is going on in the
country of Serbia. However, I did live in Russia and Eastern Europe for
a number of years. Since I speak several Eastern European languages, I
often got entirely different reports from watching Eastern news and
Western CNN and NBC (via satellite.) I can only express from my
experience and learning the history of the region that relationships
(whether good or bad) between all these countries extends HUNDREDS of
years. Why, Serbia has had a relationship with Russia for more than 600
years! Idealistic happy U.S. citizens gleefully think fuzzy cola-type
thoughts about the cold war being over and how “now Russia is our
friend.” Well, any non-U.S. citizen will caution you to be careful as
to how you define “friend” or “ally.”
>From the dawn of time peoples have scratched a line in the dirt and
proclaimed that territory theirs. They built communities then decided
that area of land was not adequate, and so the process of empire
building began. People develop their own languages and faiths.
There's also nothing new about clashes between peoples and after a
bloody war having other countries re-group and re-draw the lines in the
dirt to determine who will live where. Many times people of different
backgrounds, races and religions are suddenly forced to calling a place
“home” and are bound to a “national official language” which may not be
their own.
Basically, everybody wants to have a home.
The English are from England, the Greeks are from Greece.
You get the point.
Regrettably there are many Americans who cannot even find their own
state on an unmarked map much less find the individual countries of
Eastern Europe, much less understand how many languages and religions
people have there. To make the assumption that ALL these peoples hate
each other and cannot live peaceably would be inaccurate. However, bad
blood runs deep when certain people have had their families done in by
another group and now they are forced to live together. It's a sticky
situation.
Imagine having a bowl of ice cream with three scoops: chocolate, vanilla
and strawberry. As they are piled in the bowl and begin to melt, you can
see the trickling of the strawberry over the vanilla and rivers of
vanilla seeping into the chocolate. You can identify the melange of
flavors as they melt together. However, take a spoon and try to lift up
only one flavor, you're sure to pull up the other two. This is the
makeup of the territory.
Muslims, Christians and Jews have long had difficulties living together,
and at other times live quite nicely. In many situations there are roads
to be built, water to be brought to people children to be taught etc.
Life must go on…you go over there and pray to your God, I'll go over
here and talk to him in my way. You'd be surprised how often life can
be that simple.
But now we have a guy, Slobodan Milosovic who has different thoughts and
the U.S. believes that we need to thump him and his Serbian ilk for the
acts of aggression on “his own people.” I might point out that our own
U.S. government felt it necessary to wipe out the Branch Dividians at
Waco…might that not also be considered an act of aggression against our
own people? We didn't understand them or relate and yet we went ahead
and murdered women AND CHILDREN. Russia did not come over and begin
strafing us. But I digress.
There is no question that murdering people simply because you do not
like them is wrong. However, we allowed more than a MILLION people get
butchered in Rwanda (remember the pictures of rivers packed with the
floating carcasses of hacked up bodies?) and we did nothing.
I loathe acts of aggression on anybody. Yet, to assume that only the
Christian Serbs are murderers would be wrong. If you kill a member of my
family, I'll probably go after one of yours…so both sides are guilty of
murder. I take NO sides in this issue, while the U.S. official stance
has. Let's remember that Milosovic is an egotistical maniac (my
opinion.) Is this something that we should be risking our troops' lives
to solve? How are we going to make a peace between people whose
relationship extends long before the Americas were even discovered or
mapped?
Enough of my rambling, but I thought it worth a wee bit of background to
illustrate why the heck we're over there as from the literally hundreds
and hundreds of emails I received, seems most of us really aren't sure
as to who these people are or why we are taking part in this deadly
“humanitarian” effort.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These are letters I've received from Dragan, a Serbian in Serbia and a
Father Sava from the Decani Monastery in Serbia:
Hello Laura!
I watched Clinton the other day talking to Serbian people... how could I
believe him that he has best intentions when I have to go to a shelter
every time I hear the siren in case a pilot misses the target (either
deliberately or not)?
I think about myself as an reasonable person. I watch CNN, Sky News,
BBC and I hate what the president of Yugoslavia (Slobodan Milosevic) is
doing and what he has done and there are many people who don't believe
in his propaganda either, but what NATO is doing to us right now will
not make anyone believe in so called 'western democracy'.
I hope that not all people in the US think that Serbian people are
dirty, barbaric animals that are born to murder others... as some would
like to portray us.
I hope that the world will be able to see today's pictures from Belgrade
when about 10 - 20,000 men, women and children gathered during the day
in the center of Belgrade where music bands played and from where
Serbians sent messages of peace to the world. I don't know, shall I
say it was funny or sad to see children (and others) wearing papers
with printed concentric circles and written bellow in English
'target' (http://www.beograd.com/nato/target/target300.gif). There
were many others funny banners. :) I've just seen on the TV that
there will be such gathering again tomorrow, it starts at noon. I
remind you that NATO is bombing Belgrade as well. I know it sounds mad
but I guess that is what we are. :)
Dragon
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'll go back to the stock threads now.
Good luck to all, especially those about to be bombed again when this one day Easter break stops.
Freeus
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