The horn honked loudly from a small sedan as the driver waved his support, while John Fortier and I were walking to the street corner to set up the vigil. This driver couldn't read a sign that hadn't yet been set-up but he knew the vigil would soon begin and wanted to convey his support for it.
And the horn honks and waves continued over the next hour as others expressed their support. The vigil was joined briefly by a 53 year old Englishman who occasionally participates and by a 50 ish couple who often do.
Meanwhile in Iraq on Tuesday, just north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber walked among a crowd of police job applicants and their families and detonated his explosives. In an instant, 60 men, women and children were dead and another 160 were seriously injured.
The casualty count was so high, that some of the victims were rushed to hospitals as far away as 120 miles. And Mosques across Iraq pleaded for blood donors. But the next day, renewed attacks killed 14 more in one incident and three others in another. And on Thursday, two suicide car bombings killed 56 Shiite Muslim worshipers and police in Karbala, just south of Baghdad. Another 189 were wounded.
While in Afghanistan yesterday, a roadside bomb blew-up a van carrying families to a medical clinic, killing 13 men, women and children. Since President Obama's military surge began, people are being killed in greater numbers than at any time since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan nine years ago.
By comparison, America was stunned and deeply shaken when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona 12 days ago, killing six people including a nine year old girl and wounding 13 others. But in Iraq and Afghanistan this would be just another day.
The U.S.'s War on Terror has unleashed powerful forces that no military occupation can stop. If we as Americans want peace, we must approach it by peaceful means.
To treat people with compassion and respect and to recognize that they must govern themselves for in each case, it is their nation and we are but occupiers who invaded them destroying their economy and much of their culture. To them, we are the terrorist, the Jared Lee Loughner, that has created an unending nightmare.
For an hour each Wednesday, we hold a vigil on behalf of all these many war victims to keep them in our hearts and we appeal to the consciences of every passerby, and of every American who reads this vigil summary to please raise your voice in the name of peace and in the name of sanity.
It is but one humble step but as the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said 2,400 years ago: "All difficult things start from the easy, all great things in the world start from the small. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
Dick
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