I Do

Who even remembers the moment in mid-February 2003, almost 13 years ago, when millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to begin. Those demonstrators, myself included, were trying to put pressure on the administration of George W. Bush not to do what its top officials so visibly, desperately wanted to do: invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for decades to come, and turn that country into an American gas station. None of us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what that invasion would set off, nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we did know that, if it was launched, some set of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond a doubt that this would not end well. --Tom Engelhardt

Who remembers?  I do.  From a personal standpoint, I refer to the time as my days of rage, which translated into an enormous funk. Too many people I respected and considered friends at the time bought the propaganda.  Some of them were artists who should have known better.  The barroom where I hung out became divided. That is a terrible thing to happen to a good old bar.  I stopped going there, I stopped trying to talk sense to the senseless.


TS