From Sarah Earl comes this amazing poem that says with grace and power what so many of us think. (Originally posted on Poets Against The War.)
A Kind of Blinding —raymond thibodeaux
And now the son in his father?s thick chair
To lead a nation, against the will of the electorate,
A nation presided over by warriors made hard
By religion and an ambition for unassailable power
and a brutal version of democracy at any cost
An indolent leader given purpose by an act of terror
The sudden death of so many on their own soil
To infuriate the captains of war to revenge
Past the point of justice, to a wrath against
A manufactured evil, in the name of freedom
And with the arrogant certainty of God?s blessing
As if God, on any scale of empathy or decency,
Could ordain a rush to slaughter, but the name
Invoked anyway to steel a sense of higher purpose,
so as not to wage a war for greed of oil fields
The son so locked in the act of himself,
Bound too close–in deed and in word–by hate
To his enemies, so convinced of his own rightness
That he would ignore the voices of millions
Against the sacrifice of how many thousands
Of loved sons and daughters, loved mothers and fathers
In his quest to depose a foreign dictator whose presence
Is an act of defiance and a reprimand of his father?s failure:
To have left the field of battle unfinished, to have called off
The gunships in a moment, maybe, of pity. Or grace.
Or the painful awareness that the pursuit of justice,
Without compassion?s softening, is the beginning
Of cruelty that corrupts the just, a kind of blinding
By righteousness turned fury and the unfillable desire
To enforce in the world his own perverse goodness