Enough is enough. This new century began with violence through September 11th, and now its first decade ends in violence through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How many more innocent people must die before we can be satisfied for the blood spilled in New York? When will we learn that we can never compensate the loss of human life with the loss of more human life? We taint the deaths of victims when we pour the blood of innocents over their graves. How much longer for oil and minerals? How much longer for worldwide influence? For securing the privileges and power of a few? And the lives of those we trample overseas are not ours to do as we please; we are not gods who point and say who can and cannot live. We need to stop sending our troops to die and kill civilians in these senseless wars. Enough is enough. I refuse to be a participant in crimes against humanity. We can either be willing participants in the violence against human dignity or we can be part of those who rage against it. As a taxpayer living in this system, I am a perpetrator, a witness who like everyone else who must no longer close her eyes and allow her leaders to march her to a future of never ending wars. This doesn’t have to be our future; it doesn’t have to be our present.
The goal of my project is a simple one: demand that President Obama officially declares the end of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by pulling out all our troops from the countries. The cost of human lives far outweighs any sense of pride or victory our government desires to hold onto by continuing these wars. Furthermore, we cannot fight for social justice (education equity, job and housing security, affordable higher education, universal healthcare and childcare, etc.) here in the U.S as long as we propagate injustice overseas through our military actions.
The attacks against our liberties at home never rest, but how can we fight them or rather, reshape our values to dismantle the institutions that stabilize injustice, if we are engaged in injuring human lives and livelihoods overseas? Will we allow ourselves to suffer moral exhaustion from the length of these wars and let slip away the precious spiritual and worldwide values of human dignity? Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) writes, “I am convinced that if we are to get on this right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values…A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies” (122). This requires the people of the U.S. be more vocal to its leaders about practicing the universal values we share as humans.
And although the values marketed here are that of individualism, self-interest, and consumerism, they are not what keeps the people of this nation moving forward to build communities, support each other through social programs, and help people who are in need or are suffering from systematic social ills. The progress this country has made from its turbulent past relied on the universal value of respecting a human’s right to have security in terms of food, housing, education, space, movement, and more. This respect for human security is shared by all over the world; it’s universal so the U.S. is not an exception in this case, especially when it comes to learning how to adhere to this respect of human security.
King continues to say that “the Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A revelation of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just’” (122). Humility and a willingness to listen is not a popular trait of the U.S., but does not that mean we cannot make attempts to reach the world in this form of communication rather than communicating with our machine guns, cluster bombs, and tanks.
Kwame Appiah’s (2006) Cosmopolitanism addresses our obligation to others beyond just respect for human life, but for taking sincere “interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (XV). And this awareness that we are not isolated, but rather, as the Dalai Lama (2001) expresses, our actions impacts the being next to us; this entire world is an organism that needs the whole working to keep it alive. The work for justice here in the U.S. is far from over, which is why we cannot let our leaders continue waging war against nations because the lives of those lost and destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan are our responsibility as taxpayers of this country and witnesses to it policies.
