Anyone who still believes that the United States of America is the protector of humanity, a country with solid Christian ethics, or the good guys in white hats, hasn’t been paying attention to what we’ve been doing. Here are just a few examples:

• The Deadliness Below: From World War I to the seventies, we dumped millions of tons of deadly weapons of mass destruction into the ocean. Now they’re returning to life to poison fish and animal life, including humans, and bring about the contamination of the seas around our own country. Ignored by the major media, the Daley Press of Hampton Roads, Virginia, has started to chronicle these unfortunate activities on the part of our military geniuses and how these toxic weapons are showing up today after salt water has taken its toll on rusting containers. So far, the admitted and known dumping activities include at least 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents, 400,000 chemical filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels. Worst of all, the military is uncertain where these weapons were dumped because records of coordinates were not kept or the skippers, anxious to get rid of their cargoes, often didn’t go as far out to sea as they were supposed to go. It brings back memories of the Agent Orange used in Viet Nam and pictures of the Grim Reaper, Donald Rumsfeld, who met with Saddam Hussein in the early eighties when we wanted to support Iraq in their war with Iran. But what were we, the good guys, doing with these weapons of mass destruction anyway? Obviously, we’ve been violating the Geneva Convention for a long time while posing as the good guys.

• Depleted Uranium: Another subject ignored by the mainstream media and outlawed by the Geneva Convention are the armor piercing shells used by our troops in Iraq since the first Gulf War and still in use today. This particular weapon of mass destruction has a life span of millions of years, cannot be easily removed from sand and soil, causes birth defects and death by contact, and is poisoning our own troops. Once contracted, there’s no getting rid of it. If you don’t die right away, you will in a matter of years. There is no antidote. Doctors and Veterans Hospitals are finding otherwise healthy soldiers returning from Iraq with DU poisoning and the doctors call it “a death sentence.” Without a doubt, this is the debilitating disease written off under the rubric of “Gulf War Syndrome” in the last decade. Isn’t that what we accused Saddam of doing – poisoning his own people?

• Torture: The great debate is whether the United States should be violating every humanitarian agreement of common decency by torturing those the Bush administration defines as “insurgents” or “terrorists.” According to at least one of Bush’s speeches, this includes any man, woman, or child of any Islamic religion. His supporters will write this off as applying only to “radical” (another word for devout) Islamists. Since most Muslims face east and pray to Allah at least three times a day, this includes them all. They may all be willing to die for their beliefs, just like our own fanatics are willing to die so others might retain their inherent and impossible to avoid human condition – the ability to choose or what goes by the name “freedom.” A term we use to avoid and justify all sorts of things such as: “those people in the ninth ward of New Orleans could have moved out any time, they were free to live elsewhere, it’s their fault for staying there.” The justification for torturing these fanatics is that it’s the only way to get them to tell us about their devious plans to commit suicide by attacking us somewhere, sometime, somehow. And the corollary to this is that almost anyone will say anything they think you want to hear if the pain is severe enough. So if two of them tell us that there’s a plan to blow up Chicago subways in March, we’re off on another expansive alert as well as torturing more prisoners to tell us more about the plot. Currently, there’s a bill in Congress sponsored by John McCain, the former Viet Nam prisoner of war, against this violation and even using some of the same words from the Geneva Convention. President Bush, our leading compassionate conservative, has promised to veto this bill if it ever gets to his desk. Oh well, we can always go to church on Sunday and God will forgive us. God is a conservative. No sooner did God create man in his own image than man decided to return the compliment.

• Nukes-R-US: With a stockpile of these weapons of mass destruction sufficient to throw the earth off its axis, the country that invented nuclear weapons is still the only country in the world to have used them, not once, but twice, and while there has never been such a thing as a nuclear secret, the United States of America takes the moral high ground and declares that only those we favor are allowed possession of these total destruction devices. We’ve effectively backed out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Agreement, a treaty that never made sense without the “big boys” being willing to lay down their weapons, and are off on the development of even smaller nukes that can be used by field forces with only a third of the destructive power of the old atomic models that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki while killing thousands of innocent civilians. With “nukes-light” every soldier can be “an Army of One.” Hail the Empire. If we got rid of these, how would we intimidate other people? They might even stop loaning us money.

These are just a few of the issues Americans are not willing to face head on. Instead, we will establish committees to investigate and forgive ourselves on such lofty issues as whether women are equal to men or are really a second sex; whether those who can’t afford or are otherwise incompetent to raise children should return to back alley and coat hangar abortions; whether corporate decision makers “at the top” are truly responsible for fraud that approaches what our federal government does in spades; whether our president and his henchmen really lied us into an unnecessary invasion, war, and quagmire; whether two thousand troops killed to “save” Iraq is significant when we lost that many in the first half hour at Omaha Beach; whether tax cuts really cause bigger deficits; whether New Orleans should be rebuilt and whether Halliburton will fill it with asbestos; and whether the Ten Commandments should be allowed on government property; and so forth.

And this does not even consider or cover the fact that the borrowholics in Washington have brought us to the brink of bankruptcy, or that while people are losing their pensions and retirement funds from major corporations the government is running the greatest economic scam the world has ever seen by stealing and spending Social Security and other entitlement money as fast as it comes in and then requires the taxpaying public to repay, plus interest, what they stole and spent elsewhere. All while putting out offsetting fear stories in the form of bird flu, killer bees, millennium bugs, and baby-boomers.

Heaven forbid the people of this country should ever be forced off their couches and away from their games to do what any self respecting third world country would have done long ago – banish the guilty to Guantanamo.

Get over your depression and do something about it.