Tragic Legacy that is by War and Violence
The Universe
(March 21, 2004)
Eric Salas was a five-year-old skinny boy with baldhead and a cold sickly look when he died last week having hardly ever lived.
From birth his life was a struggle for food, clean air, shelter and education. He had none of them in the small makeshift shack called home on the perimeter of the former Clark US Air Force base in Angles City, Philippines.
In 1992, Clark was hurriedly abandoned when Mount Pinatubo erupted, leaving behind 60 years of accumulated chemical and toxic waste. Eric was the 19th child to die of leukemia in an area where there are cancers of many kinds. He was the youngest of five in a family that ate wild plants and vegetables contaminated by the toxic waste. The US takes no responsibility for this.
Today, the US troops are back and holding anti-terrorist training exercises with the Philippine Army, no doubt preparing them to fight and die battling the enemies of the US. The training was not to protect the Filipinos from terrorists but US interests like the multinational oil rigs pumping Philippine oil reserves. The human costs in getting rid of a dictator in Iraq and secure the oil reserves for the US economy are staggering. After many billions were spent on the war itself now another $87 billion will be spent on the occupation and reconstruction of what was destroyed by the war, sufficient to eradicate poverty world-wide if used with wisdom.
You would think that the President Bush and his cronies would have had enough of blood and death, but not so. They have just announced that they will have no part in the world movement to ban land mines left buried from past wars. However, the US announced recently it will produce and sell ‘smart’ land mines that supposedly will self-destruct. It will pay for the removal of minefields while planting more.
Military training can be brutal too – teaching a person to kill another can create twisted personalities with tragic results. The violent deaths of five young trainees that the British Army declared to be suicides cries out for truth and justice, as do all senseless killings and atrocities.
The evidence shows that one died of five gunshot wounds and another with two bullets to the head. The first bullet would make a second impossible. Who can we believe?
All this leads me to one conclusion – the life worth living most is that which rejects war and violence and pursues justice and peace.
