(NNPA) - Among several e-mails I received in response to my column, "Why President Obama Will Not Seek Re-Election" was one from an Atlanta (GA) Voice reader. He wrote scornfully, that the organization, World Can't Wait (WCW), has an ad that "attempts to challenge particularly progressive people (like yourself) to end their complicity of silence when it comes to President Obama….You are playing a game (and asking us to join in) that you can't win, that not just your super but your run of the mill patriots desperately want us to play."
The ones who are really playing a game that they can't win when it comes to stopping the wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan are those people, such as the one who sent the e-mail, who act as though signing petitions, ranting at forums on university campuses and distributing fiery anti-war flyers have the slightest chance of being effective in ending the wars. One wonders why he and the others whose names are on the flyer that he sent me, including Edward Asner, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsburg and Cornel West, aren't in the streets expressing their self-proclaimed outrage over what they call "Crimes of Obama." That's how the Vietnam War was stopped by mostly middle and upper-income students who had no intention of putting their lives on the line in what they considered an unjustifiable war. They took to the streets and caused all kinds of disruption. If they had been anti-war wimps the Vietnam War might still be alive and well.
In an April 24, 2009 column, President Obama's War of Choice, I wrote that "…The reason that this war (Afghanistan) and the Iraq War continues is that nearly all the soldiers being slaughtered come from low-income and working class Black, Latino and White families. If the children of Presidents Bush and Obama, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Laura Ingram, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, David Axelrod and other upper-income warmongers were being killed and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wars would have been long since ended."
It is also for certain that if the children or grandchildren of Asner, Ellsberg, Chomsky, West and their colleagues were in combat zones, they would be in the streets raising all kinds of hell to stop the wars. Seemingly, the middle and upper-income conservative chicken hawks who strongly support wars that they won't send their children to fight in and the middle and upper-income liberal anti-war wimps who fail to send their children and grandchildren into the streets to stop the wars, can both live with the fact that it's the children and grandchildren of low-income and working class families who are the main casualties of the unjustifiable wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Journalist/Lecturer A. Peter Bailey, a former associate editor of Ebony, is currently editor of Vital Issues: The Journal of African American Speeches.
