“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?” Dorothy Day
Recently a saintly friend was critical of me when she sent me a form petition to call or send a letter to President Obama supporting his recommendations on gun control. I had written back sending the picture of King saying “I have a dream” and Obama saying “I have a drone.” She points outthat “At this moment Obama’s administration is the only hope for some kind of relief…”
I beg to disagree. Using a phrase of the anti-gun movement in D.C. which President Obama borrowed in his first campaign: “We are the ones we are looking for.” How can we look to a President that sits down each Friday in the oval office with an intelligence adviser, who he just appointed to head the CIA, and makes a “kill list” of those targeted for assassination by killer drones or other means in Pakistan, Yemen, Somali or in other countries we are not at war with?
President Obama said he would close down Guantanamo Bay prison when he was president. Now it is a permanent military prison. President Obama appointed Mr. Duncan, the past Superintend of Education in Chicago under Mayor Daley as the US Secretary of Education. Duncan and Daley created the largest ROTC, military, high school system in the country in poor, gang infested neighborhoods. At one point youth in the school were being trained with military weapons. They need to travel across gang boundaries to get to a school. Chicago has the highest per capita homicide rate in the country last year, many homicides with minority youth. Maybe this is coincidence.
During the presidency the last four years the military and veteran suicide rate has skyrocket. Even “killer drone” operators, which have increased with the major use of “killer drones” are now suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
President Obama knows that he can say what he wants and as he has done for the last four years, but the “powers that be” or the “unspeakable powers” will decide what happens with gun laws. In fact, since Obama has been president there has been a tremendous increase of gun sales and with his new recommendations gun sales will increase once again.
The tactics of the “unspeakable powers” or “powers to be” is to use right or left, conservative or liberal to keep us divided and distracted while they become wealthier and more live in poverty, marginalized and suffer. For example, look at the democratic government of Honduras four years ago and the military government of Honduras today. There are many more examples but until President Obama stops the killing he is responsible for, especially of the innocent, I cannot believe he will do anything. All change starts in one’s own heart. I will struggle for the dream of Martin Luther King over the killing and suffering of a drone or any other weapons of war. The killing on the streets of Chicago and Milwaukee will only decrease when the killing by our government leaders stops and the culture of violence ends. For it is not President Obama but “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
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