Despite Everything, Life Goes On

By Colman McCarthy

Despite the U.S Army disinviting Joan Baez from giving a concert at Walter Reed hospital; despite President Bush claiming that Alberto Gonzales had his “good name dragged through the mud” after the attorney general dragged the Constitution through a sewer; despite a military jury assigning no prison time to officers involved in the Abu Ghraib torture cases; despite the Bush administration spending $600 million in Afghanistan to stop opium production and seeing cultivation in 2007 increasing 17 percent over 2006 levels; despite Paul Wolfowitz first apologizing for rigging the game so that his World Bank sweetie could rake in more money at her new job and then fuming that he was criticized unfairly by his enemies; despite family values Sen. Larry Craig first pleading guilty for his bathroom footsie game in a Minneapolis airport and then blaming the media for hounding him; despite a report stating that 36 percent of adults in Washington D.C. are functionally illiterate;

Despite George (the Dunker) Tenet writing in “At the Center of the Storm” that Vice-President Cheney is to blame for rushing the country into war and portraying himself as Mr. Integrity; despite Dick Cheney saying he hasn’t read the book but responding that he and his Bush pals had “extensive conversations” before ordering the invasion of Iraq; despite W ordering more troops to Iraq while the Iraqi parliament voted for a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal; despite Harry Reid being ridiculed and reviled for saying truthfully that “the war is lost”; despite the media’s obsession with reporting the exhibitionism of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears; despite Amy Sorrell, an Indiana high school journalism teacher and faculty advisor to the student newspaper, being fired for allowing a student to publish a column saying that being gay is not a choice;

Despite the Bush administration investigating Michael Moore for traveling to Cuba to film 9/11 rescue workers seeking treatment they couldn’t get in the United States; despite John McCain strolling along a Baghdad street with a massive security detail in tow and then announcing that the city is calm; despite Maj. Gen. John Batiste waiting until he retired from the Army and collecting his lifetime pension to tell the president, “You continue to pursue a failed strategy that is breaking our Army and Marine Corps”; despite Los Angeles cops firing some 150 rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful citizens at an immigrants’ rights rally; despite the families of 19 innocent Afghanistan civilians being killed by Marines in the Nangahar province and being given only $2,000 per death by the U.S. government, plus a meaningless apology from a colonel saying he was “deeply, deeply ashamed”;

Despite an estimated 28,000 children dying every day in the Third World from preventable diseases; despite a death rate of 50 child deaths per 1,000 in Iraq in 1990 soaring to 125 per 1,000 in 2005; despite elementary, middle and high school teachers being forced by the No Child Left Behind law to spend most of their classroom time drilling students to pass tests

Despite the media continuing to dismiss Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul as sideshow presidential candidates while the major candidates deal in bromides; despite USAID director Randall Tobias quitting after disclosures that Washington call girls were regularly giving him massages and after years of demanding puritanically that recipients of American HIV prevention grants condemn prostitution; despite Tony Snow quitting

his job as White House press secretary because his salary was only $168,000 and he needed to make some money; despite 99 active duty soldiers killing themselves in the U.S. Army in 2006 and setting a record for suicides; despite the infant formula industry successfully persuading the Department of Health and Human Services to tone down its ad campaign that breast fed babies have fewer health problems;

Despite all that summer grimness, June, July and August again saw lobelias blooming, beavers damming, Special Olympians playing, Canada geese raising their goslings, bicyclists pedaling, NCR reporting, and college graduates framing their diplomas after taking the advice of their teachers that if they want to make a difference in the world start to be different—especially from adults.