A Singe Heartbeat

09/23/2006

Paul Munnis

There are moments in history when it seems that the future is decided by a single heart beat. Such a moment has just passed where Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas advises that he now despairs of setting up a Unity government that can recognize the right of Israel to exist and to live in peace as a good neighbor.

Hamas has thus doomed Palestine and its people. Now poverty, starvation, and misery, await the residents of that place. Gaza will become a strip of earth that is a graveyard for millions.

In Iran, a stubborn government operating in the name of Islamic fundamentalist leadership insists on developing nuclear weapons bringing on world-wide UN sanctions. As the deadline for stopping the making of atomic weapons approached and then in a heartbeat passed, the fate of Iran was decided. The result will bring hardship and depravation to the people of Iran. The leaders will likely retaliate by withholding oil and denying Iran of needed foreign currency thus leading the people to poverty, starvation, and misery. If not, then increased sanctions will assure a miserable future for Iran.

In Lebanon the guns have gone silent as the UN forces patrol the streets of Beirut where homes have been destroyed, people are missing, families are broken, and poverty, starvation, and misery, are the order of the day. All this in spite of promises from Hezbolla that they will rebuild what they have caused to be destroyed. Rebuild when? In a decade? Children must eat, families must have shelter, and schools must operate, right now.

There is no joy in Israel where leaders are on the run for their jobs, families have been disrupted and people are living in fear and anger. That is no way to live and yet Israel has no answers on how to obtain peace and the government is now on very shaky ground. America, their one hope, has failed to bring them peace. An American retired president who worked hard to bring that peace now sits and watches his replacement unable to manage diplomacy and to negotiate a peace that is possibly within a heartbeat of happening. How frustrating for him and for the world.

In Iraq there was a brief moment in history when the people could chose freedom, self-rule, liberty, and equality, but instead, in a heartbeat, they chose sectarian civil war. The result is poverty, misery, hunger, and death everywhere. They were lead to this sorry state of affairs by their religious leaders.

Americans of course are in this mess up to our necks. We have elected a leader who is worse that Napoleon. He wants conquest and empire and does nothing to end the suffering of people of those lands. Indeed he has been charged with making their suffering worse than under Saddam. It is a wicked combination, a stiff-necked America, a stiff-necked Islamic fundamentalist religious state, both in their own ways a massive moral failure.

What a way to start a new millennium.

Is Islam a fundamental force for good or a fundamental force for poverty, misery, and despair? Bill Clinton says that “bad guys,” are using Islam as a cover for political and economic agendas, that it’s not about religion or about Islam, or about conflicts between Shiites and Sunni’s. Tell that to the Iraqi’s. To them it seems very much about sectarianism and whoever is behind it is manipulating Armies of gun-toting killers.

Is the Bush neo-Conservative movement an enlightened regime having a civilizing influence on the world or are they the dealers of death, poverty, misery, and destruction? I don’t like to ask that question of fellow Americans and yet that is the appearance that they give to the world.

Do the people of America have the backbone to put an end to our share of dealing out death, violence, torture, and abuse?

The answers will soon be determined in a single heartbeat by voters. The future is in their hands.