A walk through the Boston Common in the fall of 2005. Our nation was still numbed and dumbed into the facile acceptance of a war that was not a war; a police action where no one managed the police; an act of mercy where there was no mercy.

The only way to follow such a course of action is to dehumanize, and in doing so, you remove the humanity not only of government, but of the people as well. You cannot kill without denying the Other is a mother like you, a father like you will be, a child that you would have then lose. You cannot kill without simplifying a people and a language, a religion and a region. On the Common green there were heaps of shoes of all sizes and shapes, women’s shoes and children’s, men’s and grandfathers’; mounds of shoes without number, because the faceless cannot be counted.

You cannot kill without hiding your own dead, and without denying your own wounded. As of today, there have been 3,891 American troops killed. On the Common green there was a pair of boots for each man and woman slain, in ordered rank and number, counted to the last drop of blood, the last mother’s cry, and the last father’s choked silence. In rows ordered by our own design, our own denial. When we dehumanize others, we equally bury our own humanity. When the responsibility lies with us, we must hide deeper and run further from our truth, and the words that are spoken leave the lips distorted, like the sounds that escape a sneering face, speak false and speak decay, and those without the power to say nay must follow, must obey.

While we the people are foundering in the river of misdeeds — that everyone knows are deeds misrepresented, an unrepresentative government by some people, for some people, and of some people — we as a nation are unable to choose a better, healthier and stronger path. A path of creation instead of destruction, and of vision instead of blindness.

Blindness, you know, is the inability to see. And the wall of ownership and power is raised right there beyond the end of the nose, the tip of the nose is being rubbed in it; therefore those less entrenched will prevail, and will rise up a nation of stronger, more agile souls, those that can see themselves, and therefore see others, and therefore choose the path the joins forces instead of splitting fibers. When the leadership finds a cause which has some cause, stands on the knowledge that everything rises and falls, and sees the common that was on the Common that day…

… then the fallen will be our fallen, not one side or another, but fallen together, to the same earth, the same time, the same fate, the same design.

If you need to compare:

Our Cost

Their Cost

 That is the equation.