Wars Are Not Solutions

Veterans for Peace, Pakistan, 2002
© Alan Pogue

Wars Are Not Solutions

What if
you had been living for a year or more
in the bombed out rubble of your home?

What if
your youngest child had been
killed by American soldiers
firing into your car at a check point?

What if
your middle daughter
died of leukemia caused by depleted
uranium a few days before Shock and Awe
jacked contamination levels in your city
so high people will be sick for generations,
poisoned the water,
shut off the lights,
wrecked your ancient museums?

What if
reconstruction funds for your devastated
country had been awarded
to the corporations that destroyed
it in the first place, leaving 50% of
your countrymen out of work?

What if
the invaders set up a puppet government
and the only job you can find
involves protecting it
for one hundredth of the salary
paid to foreign contractors, who earn four times
as much as their military guards,
who were back-door-drafted to fight and die in
a wrong front of the War on Terror?

What would you not do
to rid your country of these people whose bombs
rip apart flesh and civil society, who don’t understand
your culture, or language?

What if
America waged a Solution to Terror,
fired Haliburton, gave reconstruction contracts
to Iraqis, management of civil society
to the United Nations, hosted a world
Summit called: Solutions to Terror,
began the work of fixing, instead of being,
the problem.

©Susan Bright, 2004

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

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