Unheard Stories

So many stories keep slipping by our national consciousness. Haiti still remains in desperate straits two years after the earthquake. Where did all those billions go? Or did they ever arrive? Some people see these human tragedies and grieve for the humans and wonder what they might do. Others try not to see it at all...compassion fatigue. The world is too sad, too many horrible things happening. Make it go away! Denial. That's why they have television. And yet others see the horrors of a poor people and think about the profit to be made in the "relief" effort.
And then there's a local story of a young black woman with a lower rank stationed at Ft. Carson found dead in her barracks from knife wound. A male Sgt. is the suspect. How many times have we heard about a murder at Ft. Carson? One national magazine labeled it the murder base. The full story has yet to come out and when it finally does the military will have done a neat and tidy cover story about the circumstances. It usually goes like this......"this is a tragic but completely isolated incident that happened to occur on the base". The family will be left out of the loop as much as the military can keep them out. The truth of rape, which has some other euphemistic title such as military sexual trauma, will be obscured if that's what has happened. Her name was Brandy Fonteneaux. She was 28. Her family talked about her being a bright light in their lives.
But the military won't talk about the bigger problem. They forget the wives killed at Fort Campbell at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. Soldiers were killing their wives on their return at alarming rates. They won't talk about the young female Marine raped by one of her co-workers on base, then made to work with him as the investigation took place. Eventually she was found buried in his back yard. But these were "isolated" events that took place. Strange when I began looking a number of years ago I found repeated isolated events of rape, violence, murder, suicide in the mainstream news that occurred on base or perpetrated by military personnel. And the military kept saying they didn't have a problem. The military won't talk about all the daughters in the military who were raped, harassed and traumatized by "friendly fire". They renamed rape. Called it MST.
I went to a meeting IVAW held recently to discuss Operation Recovery. One of the things I vividly remember was the disproportionate number of troops sexually assaulted compared to the number of therapists available to them. I remember that number being one at Ft. Hood. And how enthusiastic are survivors supposed to be using military therapists to treat sexual assault by a member of the military?
And then there's Palestine. Oh, my bad....am I supposed to talk about that?? Apparently not without some trepidation. There goes my quick walk through TSA for the next flight I take. How long are Americans going to cower in the face of AIPAC and the Israeli Zionists who have gone about creating the very type of situation the Jews faced in the Warsaw ghettos during the time of Hitler? What American politician will ever have the courage to highlight the atrocities of the Israeli Army against the Palestinian people? We are not talking about the halocaust when we talk about Zionism and the free Palestinian state. Granted there have been atrocities done to both sides and hatred has often been the motivating factor but do we really think kids throwing rocks at armored vehicles are terrorists? Or are they being trained to become terrorists by an occupying army brutally oppressing a people?
American guilt for turning away Jews at our shores during the halocaust led to an overcompensation by the people of this nation. But then politics took over. The politics of money. The presence of a Zionist nation in the middle of the largest oil resources in the world was in the best interests of the masters of war, greed and gluttony. And they could also create a nice arms business on the side, wherein they supplied both sides with the latest and greatest methods of death dealing weapons.
Make no mistake we're not talking about Americans doing this. We're talking about multinational corporations and the government they bought doing this. The American people have just been too lazy to educate themselves about the Middle East. They've bought into the lies and the fear deliberately spread by one government after another. They hear Palestinian and their minds have been programmed to think, terrorist.
And New Orleans and the Gulf. Did the 9th ever get rebuilt or did the land developers take it over and gentrify it? Did all those black folks ever get to go back to their homes? Where in the world is Anderson? And did BP quit drilling out in the gulf? Was the grasslands and bird refuges restored? Will it happen again. I had someone who works in the area with BP contractors tell me BP got a bad "rap". Really? The same BP that has raped the enviroment so often elsewhere? And why don't we ever hear about the oil spills in Africa that make the Gulf look like a drop of oil in a swimming pool?
I don't know. I must have good friends helping me hear about what happens in our world. I know I don't find it in the mainstream media. Facebook is good now but what happens when Goldman-Sachs starts to stamp its greedy mark on the social network? Or the internet is tiered and routed so only the rich get the fast lanes? Will we have to actually create our own media or actually meet in person? What an uncomfortable thought that could be. Using interpersonal skills while standing in front of our friends and neighbors. Damn, hope I've passed before that happens. I'm just getting used to texting. I forget how I used to do that in person thing. See how easy it is to pass on by those nasty things I started out talking about. Most folks don't want to hear it anyway. My kids' eyes start to glaze over. My work friends start to get nervous because they're working with a "socialist". Too bad I lack the social skills to avoid talking about such stuff.