Forums > Social Chat > A Beutiful Rendition

Posted: 24th Dec 2002
I too (Ray don't faint) am proud to be an American.
BUT if I was from anywhere else I would also be proud.

I have cried many times at the sound of our beloved anthem!
It rings true in my heart. We aren't that bad! I do have quables with the government but that does not involve all the people or the region itself.

I hold my hand on my heart in respect for those who have come to shape me into the American that I am. May we learn how to cherish ourselves and the world.

The most emotional time I ever heard our anthem was outside St. Pauls Cathedral for the ceremony following Sept. 11th. There were over 500 people on the streets outside the Cathedral crying and grieving for that which once was. It was a day of rememberance I will never forget.

May we grow and learn together from everywhere so we can all be proud of our origins.

love and hugs
drome

JUGGLEwithyourmind!

Posted: 25th Dec 2002
To some their countries colors mean nothing. Perhaps it is just somthing that you raise on a pole and they have understanding of why. To them it is nothing more than a scrap of cloth.

In midevil times if the Lord of the mannor was there you would raise a flag. Even today the practise is done when the Queen is at the palace. It is done when our Generals are in their buildings. In battle the victor would hold their flag high the loser, if left alive, would lower theirs.

Men and women fight and die for their scrap of cloth, they would sooner die than see it disgraced. A scrap of cloth can instill the pride and determination to fight on in some people, the simple raising of a flag can make the enimy flee.

In the same way a simple song can instill pride. It is played to honor those that had gone before, it is played to honor those who have yet to come.

Pride is a powerfull weapon, "One man defending his home is better than twelve hired soldires."

Honor instilled in us all, if we are willing to let it. We honor those who have died both needlessly and needed. America was bought with blood, not gold.

You may not agree with that price, and I agree it is very expensive, but becuase of my pride in my country and my desire to honor those that had gone before I am willing to pay the price.

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"

Posted: 25th Dec 2002

Posted: 25th Dec 2002
So... tell me Jim, what do you believe in? Please elaborate on your emote.

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"

Posted: 25th Dec 2002
ok firstly i'll try and elaborate on mu emote...
i guess there's an awfull lot i find offensive and and awfull lot i find quite rediculous about your post. i didn't want to get into a big argument so i figured the emote would express those feelings without to much confrontation however I will try and explain my feelings a little further now, please try and read them calmly and think about what i say. firstly the idea of "nationality" along with the idea of "organised religion" has allways bothered me. It is the main cause of war for a start, i've never understood why people can't think for themselves as individuals, why you feel you have to be part of some faction.
In your second post you go on to talk about "Lords" and "the Queen" these are roles that I see as, to be quite honest, fucking evil. I find it very disturbing that one human being feels the need to raise themselves above others, to strive for power and to dictate how we should act. You seem quite happy to act as your masters tool, I find that sad. Lastly you talk about America being "bought with blood not gold". Whos blood? The native Americans whos continent was plundered. How very charitible of you to be willing to pay this price!
As to what I believe I could go on for a long time, my beliefs are liquid as I change and learn. I believe in life, we are a small part of life, everything in the universe is alive from the stars to the rocks, the plants, the animals, everything. As humans we are given senses and will for a short time in this form, but our life continues before and after. It is every where, there are no borders, no divides. this is why i say one love.

Posted: 25th Dec 2002
The problem between you and I Jim, is that you have no loyalties. You cant call yourself an anarchist, because an anarchist has to be loyal to the cause. You cut your own legs out from underneath you. When you realsise that you can get nowhere with out others, you lash out at them. As if it were their fault that you cant do anything by yourself.

I am an American, I have sinned, my country has sinned, yet I am still proud and will show honor to those before me and to those yet to come. I cant erase the past, nor will I try. However, I will do my damndest to make sure that those yet to come do not make the same mistakes as I.

Hate me and be offended if you will, just remember I am here for you too!

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"

Posted: 25th Dec 2002
your a little wrong there about me sorry raymund. I am loyal to my beliefs and I'm loyal to my word. I haven't lashed out at anyone I simply felt the need to express my opinions, as I'm sure your aware we on the brink of what could be world war 3 and so I need to say that I feel that what your country is doing is wrong and I am scared that some who I see to bee as evil as George Bush wields such power. He wields this power through yourself and people like you. Please don't feel responsible for sins comited by your other country folk. They are not you, as you say you cannot change what has happened but I plead with you, as events unfold over the next months you will, I am imagine, be involved. Please act well and fight not soley for America but for all life, (if it is possible to kill for life)

Posted: 25th Dec 2002
I never said you were lashing out at anyone, and we are far from WWIII. The media, and yes I watch BBC too, tends to make a bigger deal out of things than what is really going on. You do not understand what is going on, because you are not here in my world. War with Iraq, will more than likly happen. All it will take is for one of those missles, that he shoots everyday at UN sactiond panes, to hit and there will be war. He (Saddam) has been breaking the law set by the UN for over twelve years now. Practically everyday he violates the international law put forth by the UN. What of that? He has been waging war against coalition forces for 12 years, what of that?

Nobody seems to care about those piolet's lives, and yes they are your countrymen as well.

In the Gulf War, he launched weapons at Isriale, killing people that had nothing to do with what was going on over his airspace. What of that?

He was trying to gode the Israilies to fight so that other Arab countries would join in on his side, no my friend, the only person who will turn this into WWIII will be Saddam, not the US.

Now, reread my first post and learn this, I did not write this to start a conflict over who is a meanie and who is an angle, I started it to share with my frieds and beutiful piece of music, after all, music sooths even the savage beast!

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"

Posted: 26th Dec 2002
Guys guys guys!

Break it up in here!

Look you both have conflicting view and will always have. I personally understand where both of you are coming from and dont quite totally agree with either!

But hey thats just me!

I cant post anyrelevant interesting stuff now as I have to get on a bus... But anyhow I just want to tell you two to be friends and not foes. Even if you dont agree you can probaly find a middle ground, no?

Goodluck to all
and Ray I will keep that vision for all time in hope that one day we can all understand why you are saying what you are saying. I was raised by a Vietnam vet and do totally uderstand your point of view although you have seen my opinions on the subject before....

Much love and hugs
drome

JUGGLEwithyourmind!

Posted: 26th Dec 2002
ok, mate I'm sorry to mess up you thread I guess we've got different taste in music or something. I found this article from the washington post you might find interesting, have a read.....

Casualties of an 'Undeclared War'
Civilians Killed and Injured as U.S. Airstrikes Escalate in Southern Iraq

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 22, 2002; Page A01

BASRA, Iraq -- She flinches just a bit when the air raid siren comes on. Not because it is unusual, but because it is not. And because it reminds her of that day just a few weeks ago.

The sirens sound most every day, once, twice, sometimes more. They are followed by the sound of jet planes soaring overhead. Then the soft puffs of antiaircraft fire off in the distance.

What Nahla Mohammed remembers from that day, however, is not the sirens or the jet planes, but running into her son on the street just after she finished shopping for supper. He asked what she would fix, she recalled. Meat, vegetables and soup, she answered. He headed off, anticipating the family meal.

Ten minutes later, according to a cousin who was there, a powerful blast slammed him to the ground as metal shards sliced through his body. Mohammed Sharif Reda, a 23-year-old mechanic married just two months and planning to build a house for his family, was among four people who Iraqi officials said were killed Dec. 1 in what they call an "undeclared war" being waged here in southern Iraq.

While U.S. troops flow into the Persian Gulf region in preparation for a possible invasion of Iraq, U.S. and British warplanes fire regularly on what the Pentagon describes as military targets. U.S. officials say the bombings and missile attacks are responses to Iraqi challenges to enforcement of the southern "no-fly" zone in place since 1991 -- painting aircraft with air defense radars or shooting at them. But the pace of the attacks has quickened demonstrably in recent months and the Pentagon has broadened its targets to a wide array of command and communications facilities in what analysts see as an effort to weaken Iraq's defenses.

The attack on Dec. 1 destroyed a pair of large vehicles parked in an oil company courtyard in the center of Basra, the country's second-largest city, located near the Kuwaiti border. U.S. military spokesmen said they hit an air defense facility, not an oil company, and in any case never deliberately attack civilian targets. But something obliterated the vehicles here and everyone questioned believes it was the Americans.

"Every day, every day, all the time. Why?" cried Reda's widow, Najila, 25, at the family home around the corner from the Museum of the Martyrs of Hostile Persian Shooting. "I ask you: Why is America bombing?"

Through the first four months of the year, U.S. and British forces struck Iraqi sites in the northern and southern no-fly zones just six times, while in the past four months they have launched about four dozen air raids. So far in December, the U.S. military has reported nine strikes around southern cities such as Kut, Nasiriyah, Amarah and Basra, including one here on Friday.

Iraqi officials complain that U.S. and British aircraft violated their airspace for patrols 1,141 times between Nov. 9 and Dec. 6. In response, Iraqi antiaircraft batteries have fired at U.S. and British planes more than 470 times this year, according to a Pentagon count, although the Iraqis have never succeeded in shooting one down.

The no-fly zones were imposed to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north and rebellious Shiite Muslims in the south from possible attack by President Saddam Hussein's aircraft. While Iraq and several major powers do not recognize the legitimacy of the zones, they have become an inescapable fact of life here.

"Not many people realize that a war has been going on for the last several years in the no-fly zone," said Gen. Amir Saadi, a top Hussein adviser. "The very people that Britain and the United States claim to be protecting, they're killing them, maiming them, depriving them of their normal livelihood and also destroying the infrastructure which is there to serve them."

The Pentagon disputes that and includes a statement at the end of each announcement of another raid: "Coalition aircraft never target civilian populations or infrastructure and go to painstaking lengths to avoid injury to civilians and damage to civilian facilities."

Until recently, U.S. and British warplanes responding to threats from Iraqi forces limited their strikes to gun emplacements, radar facilities and other sites involved in trying to hit them. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in August ordered his commanders to widen the target list to include more communications centers, command buildings and fiber-optic links.

The more strategic targeting led U.S. forces to strike the Tallil air base, the air defense sector headquarters about 160 miles southeast of Baghdad, a dozen times this fall. With hardened revetments for aircraft, surface-to-air missiles and two major runways, Tallil protects the southern approach to the capital and was a major target during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In September, U.S. planes also hit radars at a remote military airfield 240 miles west of Baghdad, far from most antiaircraft fire, in a move that analysts speculated could be intended to open a corridor for Special Forces helicopters to enter the western desert undetected.

The campaign in the south was recently expanded to include propaganda warfare as well. Aircraft dropped 480,000 leaflets at six locations in southern Iraq last week, the seventh time they have conducted such drops in the past three months, according to military officials. The leaflets, distributed in areas where coalition planes recently struck, warned Iraqis against repairing fiber-optic cables and said rebuilding defensive facilities would put their lives in danger.

The leaflets also directed Iraqis to a radio frequency where they could listen to U.S. broadcasts now beamed into the country for several hours a day by military aircraft as they patrol the no-fly zone.

While the zones were established to shield Iraqis from their leader, they have served to embitter at least some of the people, and government officials assert that they even solidify support for Hussein. "When it gets worse and worse, the people will be closer to the leadership," said Lt. Gen. Hadi Abdul Reda, head of civil defense in Basra. "They make me more eager to face the Americans."

"We hate them," said Mesa Ali, 25, a mother of two young boys who lives across the street from the site of the Dec. 1 bombing. The blast shattered her front window, covering her 18-month-old son with broken glass. "They want to get the oil and make us slaves."

"It's a crime," said Ali Abid Hamid, 31, who works at a nearby cement company and helped his cousin get to a hospital to treat a slashed throat after the explosion. "There is no reason to bomb civilians. They want to make problems."

It remains unclear how many civilians have actually been hurt or killed by the recent U.S. and British bombing. Even by Iraqi reports, most targets seem to be military facilities and government officials decline to take journalists there.

The Dec. 1 episode, however, clearly left noncombatants dead and injured, according to interviews with survivors, relatives, witnesses and doctors. The U.S. military reported dropping 23 precision weapons from 13 aircraft in southern Iraq that day in retaliation for antiaircraft fire at warplanes patrolling the northern no-fly zone two days earlier, the first time they had struck in the south for an incident in the north.

The U.S. military said it hit unspecified air defense targets near Basra and Kut, but not an oil installation. Witnesses and survivors, though, said two explosions erupted in the yard of the state-run Southern Oil Co. in the center of Basra between 10 and 11 a.m., about the time U.S. warplanes were reported to be striking. Iraqi officials said four people were killed and 27 injured.

U.S. officials in the past have accused Hussein of positioning mobile air defense units in civilian locations in an effort to prevent them from being destroyed or to draw enemy fire that would kill innocents, thus creating a propaganda victory for Iraq. From the street, about 50 yards away, it appeared clear that at least two large vehicles were demolished by the explosions at Southern Oil. But it was impossible to determine whether they were civilian trucks or mobile missile launchers or radars.

Iraqi officials would not allow an American reporter inside the compound to examine the site.

What was clear was that people such as Watheka Raheem Feyad were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Feyad, 25, a clerk at Southern Oil, had just returned from vacation and was walking between buildings when she was suddenly blown off her feet.

"I felt like I was being sucked up into the air, two to three meters up," she said. "I didn't know if it was a rocket or a missile or a bomb. I didn't know what was the matter. I was afraid and shocked. The noise was very, very loud and I lost feeling in my legs. I closed my eyes because I was so scared."

Two colleagues dragged her away, she said, and she later woke up in the hospital. Her brother, Ali Raheem Feyad, 38, raced to the hospital at 100 mph when he heard the news and was initially told that she was dead. She was not, but she suffered a head injury and multiple fractures of her leg, which is now in a metal splint, and still has shrapnel in her body. She takes six types of drugs, faces several more operations and will need at least a year before she can walk again, according to her doctor.

Mohammed Sharif Reda was not so lucky. Walking outside the gate, he and his cousin were caught in the blast, family members said. His relatives were already angry at Americans, blaming his uncle's death from cancer in March on depleted uranium used in some U.S. weapons in the area.

"They are killing people," Nahla Mohammed, 49, who has lost her son and brother, said, occasionally succumbing to tears as she talked. "Why do they commit such crimes? Why was my son just walking along the streets and died? Why?"

Reda's cousin, Sabah Hassan Mohammed, 23, who was walking alongside him that day, survived but suffered deep gashes in his left leg and deep resentment in his heart. At the hospital last week, he winced in pain and clutched his brother's hand.

"I will get better and I will take revenge, for me and for others," he said. "We are strong. Even if they keep bombing us, we will bear it and we will show them the results."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

Posted: 26th Dec 2002
To Raymund,

I'm assuming you are in the armed forces and I want to say that I support you and all the people who are in service.However,I do not support our government and at times am disgusted to be an American.I agree that Saddam needs to be removed from power but do we really need to make the whole country pay as well?I said it in another thread but after the inevitable war with Iraq are we going to be any safer?Are they going to hate us any less or should I say are they going to finally be afraid of us?After we are done in Iraq are they just going to send you to North Korea so Bush can keep winning popularity contests?(What I mean by that is what was the majority opinion of George Bush on 9/10/01?)We all know that if we do go to war that Saddam isn't afraid to use chemical weapons on us.Do you want to see young Americans die for a war as pointless as Vietnam was?We have what is heralded as the greatest military on the planet so is there no other way?Please read this and understand that I am not anti-American but if anything don't want to see democracy sacrificed for big business.Democracy is not "you'll do as we tell you or we'll go in and destroy your country".Also the government keeps saying they have iron clad proof that he is producing weapons of mass destruction so why haven't they produced any yet?In closing please don't receive this in anger but instead with an open mind.And please be safe.

Posted: 26th Dec 2002
A stratagy in fighting is to cut the "head" off the enimy. If you can disrupt communications, you can then attack when and where at your leasure without having to worry about much resistance.

The people that have been killed accidently are nothing short of a tragidy. I will not belittle them by saying that they are calateral damage, even though that is what they are considerd on paper.

Is it possible that there had been a communications tower or radar site where that oil company was? It is very possible. Is it possible that it was just an oil company? That too is possible, I can not judge from here. Man is quite foulable.

It is not an unheard of thing when Saddam places his own people in harms way. It is a tactic that he used for the duration of the Gulf War and it is something he will use untill he is either out of people or untill his is removed from power. That is the mesure of that mans resolve. Turning men women and children into human shields. A cowerdly act, from a cowerdly man.

Poiaholic, in a game of poker do you show someone your hand, especially if you know it cant be beaten?

A poor analagy indeed but it works. There will be a time and a place for proof and right now they do not feel it is time. Maybe they need to get their undercover agents out or some BS like that. There are so many reasons why not to show this proof, and very few reasons to show it.

Lastly there is no democracy in the world, yet there are republics. In a true democracy all actions taken by the government would be voted on by the people. The second that doesnt happen it becomes a republic. America chooses its leaders, nothing more.

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"

Posted: 26th Dec 2002
last year I kouldn't spell Enimy
this year I are killing them.

Ray, please, It reflects very badly on the US military if you don't use the spell checker, and really reduces the effectiveness of your debate.

next you'll be bombing Tie-rack.

swing with peace

Cousin Louie

Posted: 26th Dec 2002
If we reserved discussion only for those with correct grammar and one hundred percent on their spelling tests, we would have a pretty sad democracy.

It was a day for screaming at inanimate objects.

What this calls for is a special mix of psychology and extreme violence...

Posted: 26th Dec 2002
Ray your analogy wasn't a bad one just in the wrong context.In a poker game you're gambling money.In the Middle East you are in a lot of ways gambling with the fate of the planet.That whole area is ready to go into a full-scale war.You have the Israelis and the Palestinians,India and Pakistan,Afghanistan is at war with itself,we want to go to war with Iraq without the consent of most of the Middle Eastern nations.Plus they're saying Bin Laden is still alive.How can we say we can get Saddam when we still haven't gotten this asshole. If you are holding a royal flush than what do you have to hide?Isn't also well publicized the American government's willingness to put it's citizens and soldiers in harm's way(Pearl Harbor,Vietnam,9/11).We could both debate this til 3003 but the real problem is you see things one way and I see them another.So instead of bringing up point after point I want you to answer my original question.If we do go to war with Iraq and defeat Saddam will we be any safer?Once Saddam is toppled will the Al Qaida's & all the other terrorist organizations cease to exist?

Posted: 27th Dec 2002
Hehe, your right I do need to start using a spell checker hehe however I had just got done working outside in some bitter cold weather. My fingers let alone my brain were not working. No body is perfect. I am so glad that you were there to correct me and worry about how my spelling and gramer reflects on my ability to go out and do my job!

I am not here to debate Iraq. Just to share with others something that I felt was an outstanding piece of music. If all you can say is Iraq when someone says America then you are the one with the problem. Find another post to talk about it in, get out of mine!

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"

Posted: 27th Dec 2002
fair play Ray, peace

Posted: 27th Dec 2002
My humble apologies o'patriotic one.I must have accidently thought this was a forum to express your feelings.PEACE

Posted: 27th Dec 2002
Voicing your opinion is what this is about, yes.

I didnt open this thread to talk about Iraq and it got way way way off topic real fast.

I wanted to share good music with you all instead I get this Iraq BS.

It offends me when people take something quite nice and turn it into something bitter and nasty.

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"