Dear President Bush,

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. Every time I see another photo of a dead child, dead by our bombs…every sad twisted story of our army… another army gone wrong…I think: Today, there will be even more people who hate us in the world. I want all those people in Palestine and Iraq and everywhere to know that I don’t like what you are doing. It is near impossible to trust you and most of your associates in government. Your vision is not one of democracy. It is not even one of fairness or kindness. Our ancestors are dishonored. Our children’s lives will be burdened with repairing this mess.

We would all be better off if you had sought treatment, had never run for office, had not thought yourself good enough, had not seized power, nor assembled your greedy team and ordered all this killing. How will you take responsibility for all the hatred and sorrow you have brought into the world? Other dictators are being brought to justice, who stole elections, who persecuted, who ordered massacres, who let children be murdered, who lined their friends’ pockets with the people’s gold, who lied and misused the terrible power of armies. You too will face judgement.

You want us to believe your vision is still good. It is rotten. The money wasted in warfare will never be spent on education, healthcare, and environmental reforms needed to sustain and improve human life on this planet. The victims of global weather catastrophies struggle, the meaning of 9/11 is ignored, children are bombed, the rest of the world begs us to stop… meanwhile, your friends at Halliburton, Raytheon, KBR, Bechtel and Carlyle line up again and again to suck the marrow from our nation’s bones. I can see that we have become the real evil-doers. We build the bombs, we blow it up, we rebuild it, we build more bombs, we blow it up again…endlessly, shamelessly, repeating. AND at every turn of the wheel, the American people must pay these friends of yours.

So may your friends also stand and face judgment in this horror.

Rice: oil tycoon, co-owner of Exxon, wealthier with every gas increase.

Cheney: greedy energy cost manipulator, war profiteer like no other in history.

Rumsfeld: avoided military service, arms trader, Saddam’s old friend, lied to start war.

Gonzales: author of the writs of torture, presiding over mass deportations

Wolfowitz: architect of the war, destroyer of world economics. et al…

Do not wave the Holy Bible in our face any more. Decent people are offended by your smug smile, by your jokes, your media cheer leaders and your apologists. We feel sorry for you. Watching you on live TV, it is painful to see your thoughts jam and hear your words falter and…a pause… You search for the most appealing yet insubstantial words to say, to a soldier without legs, to the homeless of New Orleans, to elders, to America’s urban poor. In another part of your mind you are busy dropping bombs, cutting taxes for the rich, denying benefits, slashing pensions, and choking education. Your liar’s pathology will not let you be so glib about what you are up to. Your mind is also seeing the images of poverty, death and destruction. In those searching seconds of silence, decent people all over this planet see the distance between good and evil in your soul, as the leader of the free world unmasks a terrible insanity.

And as the proportion of dispossessed, widowed and wounded grows in our land, you are your own undoing. Only 28% of our nation is still in the denial that allows them to support you. The other 72% are people of different economic backgrounds, ages, colors, and spiritualities. Yet we form a group of likeminded people. You see, we believe that it is not human to turn away from other people’s suffering, not human to ruin the air and the water for corporate profits, not human to preside over the destruction of innocent peoples’ lives and livelihoods here or in other lands. We feel there is something wrong with the accumulation of private wealth that exceeds the GDP of some nations. We think the dream of America has been hijacked as surely as planes on 9/11. Daily we pray together as one. We pray for our deliverance from vicious extremists like you.

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. You could have an amazing epiphany, like John Newton the slave trader, and you could turn this ship around! It would be the single most momentous event in the history of humankind.

Are you there? Hello…?

David Stocker
Is a musician in Illinois
dijeridoo [at] aol.com