NOTE: EDITOR JOE VIGLIONE HAS INTERVIEWED MICHAEL MOORE AT A ROUNDTABLE IN BOSTON
I have been a witness to 40+ years of those in power seeking to dumb us down, demoralize us, crush our spirits and keep us in our place with little or no political or economic power. If we want to speak up, to write, to broadcast ourselves, to have our voices heard — where do we go? Ask Anderson Cooper to have us on his show? Instead of a hedge fund closing a local paper, how ‘bout give it to us? Social media? Let’s be honest: They’re all massive corporations, complete with their own, often insidious, motivations to “drive eyeballs” no matter the cost to our social fabric. That’s what passes now as “freedom of speech.”
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So, our empire has once again lost another war. We won our last one 76 years ago this past Sunday. At some point, don’t they relegate us out of the Premier League or sell us off to Yahoo?
In 2001, in the days after 9/11, mine was a lonely voice insisting that we not invade Afghanistan. On September 15th, 2001, I sent a personal letter to my email list, saying this:
I feel I have a responsibility as an American to speak out and say what needs to be said: That we, the United States of America, are culpable in committing many acts of terror and bloodshed and we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants. I know it's a hard thing to hear right now, but if I and others don't say it, I fear we will soon be in a war that will do NOTHING to protect us.
In a subsequent letter I asked the nearly one million people on my list to join me in trying to stop this war. Many of you were on that list. You inundated Congress with calls and letters. Although we couldn’t stop that war, nor the one in Iraq, we continued to organize, to march, to vote and to raise a generation who grew up to overwhelmingly prefer peace and detest state-sanctioned killing (fact: since 9/11, nearly 80 million young people have become of voting age).
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