Like everyone else, I was sickened by the senseless carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary. But I find myself almost alone in harboring the same outrage toward the Sandy Hooks our Executioner in Chief rains down on children in nations we are at war with.
Every few days, Hellfire missiles are fired from Predator drones at supposed enemies of America in their homes with their families. Wives, grandparents and children are “neutralized” with callous dispatch, justified in the name of The War on Terror. Nothing is said nor tears shed for those murdered—children or otherwise. Incredibly, the justification given is, “We killed them, therefore they must have been terrorists.”
DronesWatch.org provides a list of children killed by the United States’ ongoing Death by Drone program. The number of dead kids is at least six times the number who died in the Sandy Hook shooting. But these dead kids do not live in America, so they don’t really matter, do they? They would have grown up to be terrorists, so it’s a good thing we killed them before they could grow up to kill a future American soldier.
The Sandy Hook massacre should be an opportunity to think about the violence we bring to families in other lands and its inevitable spillover into the homeland; they are not separate and isolated from each other. The post-Sandy Hook focus on domestic gun violence and gun control shuts out any thoughts of the terrorism we proudly rain down on the “un-people” of the world—a tragedy on top of tragedy.
CLEE PAUL AMES
Eureka