Sometimes We All Lose

Kathy Kelly (who I had the opportunity to meet and spend an afternoon with a few months ago) is back in Amman, Jordan.  She's got a piece out today that tells the story of a family of Iraqi refugees though a lens of Tom and Jerry cartoons:

This week, the U.S. government will continue deliberating over how much money to earmark for particular defense expenditures. They will serve the insatiable demands of the largest lobby on Capitol Hill, the defense lobby, which is asking for a total of $648.8 billion dollars.       

Even Senator Kennedy, one of the few Senators advocating measures to benefit Iraqi refugees, recommends allotting $100 million in the 2008 defense budget for a new General Electric fighter engine. (The Boston Globe recently reported that the Air Force said it didn't even need the item.)

Democratic candidates claim they are interested in ending the Iraq war. They claim concern      for Iraqi victims. I believe these claims. Yet by obediently funding the war machine, most of them play predictable, scripted roles in a dull and murderous war without end. The victors are   always the same, the bloated and menacing producers of weapons,--General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, General Electric,--the fat cats whose menacing force always wins. The losers can watch their children become crippled, starved, maimed or dead. Period.

Tom and Jerry is much loved in Amman because "sometimes Tom wins and sometimes Jerry, and sometimes they both win... you love them both."  As Kelly so eloquently writes, this particular show isn't quite like that.  However, my feeling is that when the victors are always the same bloated and menacing producers of weapons then we all lose, albeit some of us more comfortably than others.  We who can so easily ignore families like Umm Daoud's may have lost our humanity but at least we can still drive our SUV's.