By Antonio D. French
Filed Monday, March 19, 2007 at 8:39 AM
Opponents of the America's war in Iraq staged a demonstration downtown yesterday to mark the 4th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of the Middle Eastern nation. Labels: War
Hundreds of faux headstones stood in the park area at the corner of Market and Chestnut to symbolize the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans killed and wounded since the beginning of the conflict.
One blog commenter said that following the end of their own demonstration, several students who had been in City Hall walked over to join the anti-war rally.
9 Comments:
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3/19/2007 9:52 AM
I think that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea. I do not see an exit stategy that will ever work. The worst part for me is that I was snowed by the WMD excuse for at least the first six weeks of this disaster. I hate Bush et.al. for this. At least when Clinton sent a cruise missile over, the exit stategy could have been; oops, My finger slipped.
Please don't post SLPS items on this thread. You just diminish your point and make it look like spam.
3/19/2007 10:16 AM
Star Jones, I suspect your extreme dieting is clouding your ability to think and communicate with reason. Your posting is unintelligible since your compare and contrast if Bush and Slay does not make sense, simply it does not work. I am raising kids and living in the city and see the parochial schools as the only reason for many Catholic families to remain in the City. The SLPS have pissed away too many opportunities to improve thus breaching the confidence and trust of the larger community.
I fail to see how the parochial schools how they have benefited the SLPS demise. Please take your bigoted remarks against Catholics elsewhere. We like many just want a place to raise our children in a loving and nurturing environment where they can thrive and be successful. We pay our taxes but receive no benefits from the SLPS. This is not in the face of anyone who wants his children to have a secular education.
3/19/2007 2:13 PM
Look, they have every right to protest, but they are wrong, wrong, wrong. They are naive, don't understand the world, and think the best of Islamic terrorists who would rather kill us all than have us think differently than they do. Come to think of it, that sounds like many of the liberals I know, only they're slightly more civilized since they live in a modern, civilized of the world.
3/19/2007 5:44 PM
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
3/19/2007 8:10 PM
Please refrain from personal attacks — especially those unrelated to this post.
3/19/2007 9:09 PM
Antonio, are you going to move all personal attacks or just the ones you disagree with? If you're going to be consistent, and remove the former, I suggest Star's comments about the Mayor and the President as "cowards," "idiots," and corrupt.
3/20/2007 12:10 AM
teacher says how do you prtect some and not others?
3/20/2007 12:29 AM
In defense of Star's post, I do see some parallels between the Iraq war and the school takeover. It seems to me that the common thread is the knee-jerk nature of them both. Without a doubt there was some "hyping" of the war before we went in. The connection between Iraq and 9/11 was fuzzy at best, and the war furror served to distract people from any serious effort to explore the very real threat of terrorism from the radical Islamic world. If not for the panic-stricken "we MUST do SOMETHING" response, wiser minds may have been able to asses more clearly the enormous depth of the problem before we found ourselves deeply bled out in the middle of something we cannot escape from without making things even worse.
The same kind of panic-stricken mentality is in force right now in regard to the school takeover. There is very much a "we MUST do SOMETHING" feel to the air. It would be wise to learn from our mistakes and calculate the true depth of the problem of urban education before jumping into the midst of it with guns blazing. We may find ourselves in a situation where we end up making things worse and cannot even return to the place where we can undo the new problems we create.
Urban education, like radical Islam, is a complex and multifaceted problem. Urban schools, like Islamic countries, are not homogeneous, but differ vastly in their character and ability to control the more dysfunctional elements within them. It was nice to briefly believe that "great, big America" could step in with "shock and awe" and end the problem of terrorism. But obviously, this is not true. Neither is it true that the state can step in and "fix" the problems of educating the dysfunctional masses of urban children in St. Louis by simply "taking control of things".
What was needed BEFORE war in Iraq was a wise, calm-headed, well-researched noble plan stemming from a stark and true assessment of the nature of the enemy. This is also what is needed now in the educational setting in St. Louis.
In the war, the first mistake made was identifying the enemy as Iraq, when in fact, the enemy was hundreds of millions of uneducated, poor people easily swayed into self-destructive and maniacal behavior by evil men bent on world domination pointing fingers at the greed and indifference of Western society.
In St. Louis, the school district has been identified as the enemy. This is also not the case. The enemy is again, the disenfranchised poor of society who are easily swayed into self-destructive and maniacal behavior by the evil among us who peddle a gang/drug lifestyle to our city's children as a way to fight back at the America that has abandoned them, AND the greedy and self-serving of society who have, in fact, abandoned them.
Henry V once won a battle by catapulting bread over the walls of the seiged castle instead of weapons. I think there's a lesson there. It may be too late for the war in Iraq, but it is not too late for the state to take this lesson to heart and seek to develop a wise and noble PLAN to help St. Louis children, not just a "do SOMETHING NOW" reaction.
3/20/2007 8:29 AM
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