“Out of a Mountain of Despair,
a Stone of Hope”
MLK Memorial in D.C.

President Obama announced from his Christmas vacation in Hawaii that the US was finally pulling out of Afghanistan after 12 years or so of our war on this nation. Actually 11, 000 US troops would remain to aid the Afghanistan military who has suffering its worst year of lost of life. In fact this year, 2014, has been the bloodiest in the history of this war. As with Iraq this country is in much worse shape than when we invaded it. In Iraq it was the false belief that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and in Afghanistan it was the existence of the Al Qaeda group that gave us the reason for invasion. There was no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and the Al Qaeda group is long gone in Afghanistan. What good did the lost of American lives in this countries do and what good came from the many victims, refuges and destruction the civil wars that we created in these two countries. There are now more civil wars and killing in this area than before and the disease of war and violence has spread to Somali, Yemen, Syria, Sudan and Pakistan.

The US has placed bounties of 3–5 million dollars on the increasing number of leaders of what we call “terrorist” groups in these countries. The lessons of history have taught us that throwing violence and money at these struggles will bring us only more violence and killing and cost us more money.

I used to think that our political leaders did not understand this lesson from history but now think they are smart and intellectual people and know exactly what they are doing. I can say the same about the housing crisis in this country where hundreds of thousands of persons lost their homes in foreclosure and are now forced, if fortunate, enough to live in rental units, often owned by landlords who purchased these homes.

However, with Christmas and the New Year I look for hope. I found hope in the growing number of people who are aware of the real causes of the greed and violence around them and are starting to speak out. If we can stay away from the temptation to fight violence with violence and greed with greed we can form communities that will throw wrenches into the machines of destruction not stopping the fall of empire but at least slowing it down. We can than organize communities and when the Empire falls, as history dictates it will, we can form new communities based on peace and justice not the accumulation of might and wealth. In the shell of the fall of the empire we can begin again and building a community of love for all. This dream of hope keeps the nightmares of despair away.

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