I'd like to share with you the first stanza of a poem I recently wrote, "On Nonviolent Resistance":
I first fell for Dante Alighieri
back in high school. Although then I
didn't understand much past L'Inferno,
in those days a burning schoolgirl running
from her village set alight by U.S.
napalm dropped "to save it," caught forever
by a camera "luckily" positioned
on her road from there to anywhere, made the
hell of his times easy to see in ours.
In the last few days, at the orders of the "president", U.S. forces bombed Irani desalination plants providing water to tens of thousands of people, and destroyed bridges and a tunnel relied upon by civilian traffic: in short, once again, our country has joined the not-so-elite ranks of those who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity at the behest of their highest leaders, as a matter of policy. I don't in any way mean to excuse similarly awful actions on the part of Iran's leadership; but, I'm not Irani, I'm an American, and what our "president" does, he does in my name. That this is nothing new doesn't make it any better. That he already has been committing similar crimes in the Caribbean and Pacific for months, sinking civilian boats in international waters without the slightest color of law, doesn't make it any better. Nor does it make it any better that the deaths and suffering our "president" is wreaking upon innocent Iranis are numerically insignificant compared to the hundreds of thousands (mounting eventually into millions) of needy people worldwide already doomed to death by disease and starvation by our "president's" destruction of USAID programs that fed and sheltered and helped heal and immunize them before he set loose his dog Elon Musk upon them. The demolition job that the "president" is doing on our democracy, our rule of law, and the international order that the U.S. constructed and that, however flawed, provided a substantial measure of stability since world War II, pale in comparison to the sheer horror and scale of what he is doing to individual human people everywhere around the globe. It is so ironic as to be nearly forgotten that almost the first act of the War on Iran, purportedly justified by the intent to safeguard future generations from the Irani regime's evil, was the murder by U.S. forces of several hundred female schoolchildren. We have come full circle, from that Vietnamese girl burning on the road. Truly, although each of Donald Trump's accomplishments is noteworthy on its own, they are cumulative in nature. He is one of the great monsters of human history; in that, if in nothing else, he stands in the first rank of human achievement, along with such as Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Hitler.
