Why Bush wants dead & wounded hidden

Photo essay reveals why Bush wants to keep the dead and wounded hidden
By Teresa Simon-Noble
Online Journal Contributing Writer

March 19, 2004?-Photojournalist Nina Berman's photo essay, The Damage Done in Mother Jones magazine, of young wounded soldiers in the Iraq invasion is a visual explanation as to why George W. Bush does not want pictures of the dead or wounded returning home to be flashed across the nation's television screens or on the pages of our newspapers.

It is heart gripping to see the pictures of these young men who have lost a leg, or two, or an arm, or whose bodies are covered with shrapnel, or who have become quadriplegic, or have suffered any degree of brain damage and whose lives have forever been derailed by a man whose greed for oil and whose need to avenge his father mattered more to him than the duty to care for our soldiers by not sending them to any unnecessary wars.

What a reprehensible Bush misuse of people's lives and of people's sense of patriotism and of love of country!

What an unselfish, generous gift these young men and women?-and the thousands more like them, have made to this country and to the unelected commander-in-chief who sent them in harm's way through a series of lies, manipulation of facts and mythologized need for war in Iraq and wherever in the world the pursuit of "evil" tickles his fancy.

Like my friend Chuck, a young soldier who tells me that he cannot pause to think about why he joined the army when he did, or why he has been sent to Iraq, or why he is even in Iraq because he has to stay focused on the job at hand in order to survive not just the snipers but keep his own emotional stability. Perhaps other soldiers, too, who say they would do it over again, need to stay focused as a way of keeping anger or desperation out of their systems.

What would they have to face, otherwise? They would have to face not only the emptiness of a needless war and the savagery of war itself, they would have to face the meaninglessness of their invaluable sacrifice to us in the face of so many questions about a war so fraught with lies and in manipulation. They would have to face the purposeless derailment of their own life's journey.

All of which is powerful stuff and not easy to have to contemplate in the blossoming of their youths.

What a dizzying effect: the battle between what is real and what is fabricated; between what is and what should not have been. Between the potential and possibilities for one's life's journey and that journey as it has become truncated by the effects of Bush's greedy, narcissistic invasion of another country.

How dizzying it must be too for Bush to have to stand before the carnage of wounded soldiers returning home, knowing that he did not do right by them or by the country that he claims to love and the constitution that he swore to "preserve, protect and defend." That is why he must flee, like a serpent that flees from the grace of God that is love and truth, when the dead and wounded return home. He knows he lied to them and to the country. He knows he only cared about himself, his greed, the avenging of his father, and the showing off of his ill begotten power.

Bush and his father (whose tacit support for the Boy's policies and the Boy's actions makes him as complicit as the Boy), as well as all of the Bush handlers and his corporate media propaganda machine, know that scenes of our returning dead and wounded across our television screens would end Bush's sell of his mythological war against phantom evildoers seen only by Bush's mind and ever changing color coded alerts.

Borrowing a page of cynicism from the Bushes, the Democrat's presidential contender ought to place a couple of those Bush, War is Glory, speeches to the troops, against a backdrop of pictures of returning Iraq occupation dead and wounded with a stream flashing on screen that reads 'THIS IS THE REALITY OF WAR."

People might just pause long enough to think about what kind of a man they'd want their leader to be, and about the sort of qualifications they'd want him to have; not just those qualifications that are learned in an institution of higher learning and are posted in any resume, but in experiences as rounded by the man's life's journey and in the buzz of his every day family life.

People might have cause to pause and think long and hard whether they want to vote for a "war president," or whether they want to vote for a "peace president." A man with enough understanding to know that war is not the way to peace, that carnage is a road to nowhere, and with enough courage to stand ready to face the consequences of his actions, the carnage of wounded and maimed soldiers returning home, the body bags and draped coffins that paid for Bush's fabricated war. A man ready to pronounce: Never again. Never in the name of greed. Never, ever in the name of oil.

Teresa Simon-Noble is a computer activist for peace and social justice. She is a former mental health clinician. A poet and a freelance writer, her work has been published in several online publications.