The note below is a response to an article about the Strategic Air Command HQ’ed in Omaha, NE. Since my childhood SAC has been the “first strike” response to any perceived attack or danger to American soil. How they missed the happenings of 9-11 is still a mystery but some say that was a day of “training” which took them away from the NYC and D.C areas. Reassuring.
While it’s true Omaha’s Strategic Air Command is the center of the universe of Hell, the entire mid section of America takes part in the nuclear hell waiting to happen. In an area stretching from Colorado to Montana to North Dakota to Nebraska over 500 hundred nuclear missile sites sit in fields of American farms looking very innocent except for the chain link fences surrounding them.
Every one of those missiles is on “ready alert” even after the fall of the evil empire once known as USSR fell. Communism became terrorism and the aging missile systems have new targets and maintain many of the old targets. One of the 530 missiles is ten times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Despite all attempts to cover up the truth by the military and our “leadership” in D.C. several former service people who had the key of nuclear winter in their hands have talked about the times they witnessed near misses in launching one of those missiles. If you think that number is extremely low, you’re wrong.
Sisters Ardith Platte, Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson, Dominican nuns, have been imprisoned for their passionate resistance to these sites. They are now free but face another term in federal prison for their refusal to pay for the chain link fence the military destroyed in arresting the elderly sisters after they had entered a site near Greeley, Colorado by using bolt cutters to open the gate. Their story is documented in the movie, Conviction.
Colorado is also home to several other secret facilities that guide and monitor nuclear sites as well as satellites in space. Every day we have people drive by our missile sites and our secret bases without a clue the end of the planet is one mistake away at any one of the sites. Imagine those who work in these places. How much must a person have to be in denial or totally oblivious to reality? Or totally sold on the propaganda of the liars-in-chief.
One common theme has kept these true “weapons of mass destruction” in place. Fear. The American people have been led to believe their lives were in peril from some evil force outside their borders since the days of the founding fathers. Since World War II that fear has been stoked and manipulated by politicians to feed the omnipresent military-industrial-complex Eisenhower warned about during his Presidency. Before Eisenhower, George Washington warned about the military being too powerful. But fear has festered and Americans have failed to have faith in the very God they claim to believe in. They have failed to have faith in people of other nations and in the process alienated enough people to create powerful enemies.
A professor at our state university in Boulder had the audacity to say 9-11 was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost” in America. He added references to the victims of the twin towers being like little “Eichmanns” because of their participation in carrying out American policies. Unfortunately, the message was lost in the hyperbole of the professor’s choice of analogy. Americans failed to process why we’re hated by others in the world. Instead they allowed the “Madmen of Crawford” to seek revenge. Instead they willingly gave up essential rights and freedoms to be “safe”.
We can put on all the helmets, knee pads and chest protectors we want but we won’t find safety until we begin to participate in the world as responsible citizens of the world. Parents in this country have created “the nanny generation” because the world is perceived as evil and dangerous and fear dominates them. The fear of Americans is cynically orchestrated by the rich and powerful and directed away from the true sources of evil that should elicit fear. As Pogo once said in the comics, “we has seen the enemy and he is us”.
If we look at our state of the union from politics to environment, from human suffering to humanity the genius of Walt Kelly’s comic character rings as true today as it did back in my childhood of the late fifties and early sixties.
Wm. Terry Leichner, RN
Denver VVAW member
Vietnam combat vet
Posts
