Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [54]
10. No child must be a slave laborer. You know how parents are—they want their kids in schools, not sweatshops. While you are sending your child to school with a banana in his lunch box, ten-year-olds in Ecuador are trotting off to work beside their parents at banana plantations where they earn . . . nothing! If anyone complains, the company fires the kids and expects the parents to make up the extra workload. Who do you think pays for this when this child becomes an angry adult?
11. When we kill civilians we shouldn’t call it “collateral damage.” When they kill civilians we call it terrorism. But we drop bombs on Iraq, and more than 6,000 Iraqi civilians are slaughtered. We then apologize for the “spillover.” Al Qaeda bombs the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 3,000 are slaughtered, and it’s terrorism. But what right did we have to drop bombs on Iraq’s civilian population? Were those civilians threatening any of our lives? I thought the only time you can take another’s life is when they are about to take yours—or did I miss something somewhere?
Of course it’s hard to not kill civilians when even your smart bombs go dumb—in Iraq about one in ten went off course, blowing up homes, markets, and bakeries instead of missile defense systems. Hell, some of the smart missiles didn’t even hit IRAQ—they slammed into Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Sorry about that!
12. When declaring your “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” make sure it really is. Otherwise, you might end up with a lot more dead soldiers. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all said at one time or another that the Vietnamese communists were on the run, defeated, or destroyed—and there was always a “light at the end of the tunnel.” Some 58,000 dead American kids later—not to mention four million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians—we finally figured out that the only way to “accomplish the mission” was to get the hell out of there. We’ve yet to apologize for our massacre. Something tells me that that “mission” has not been forgotten by the poor of the world.
13. One sure-fire way to make us REALLY safe would be to destroy the weapons of mass destruction still in the hands of the nation that has killed more people with them than all other nuclear nations combined. Yes, let’s destroy our weapons of mass destruction, right here in the U.S.A. Then let’s call in Hans Blix to verify we did the job. Only after we smash every atom bomb into depleted uranium ploughshares will we have the right to tell North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and the rest that THEY don’t need such weapons. Not only will we set a good example, but we’ll save a lot of money, too. And we’ll still have enough high-tech firepower to incinerate any people of our choosing, or out-gun any rogue nation.
14. We must immediately disavow Bush’s preemptive war policy. We need to slam shut this insane Pandora’s box Bush and Cheney have opened—the notion that it is ethical to kill people in case they want to attack us is not the way to relax the rest of the world when they see the Stars and Stripes.
15. Stop acting like a thief who says “stick ’em up, hand over your weapons, and okay, now hand over your oil.” Just go straight for the oil and cut out the bullshit about nation building or democracy. Sure it would be wrong, but it would be cheaper and more honest—and we wouldn’t have to blow random civilians to smithereens.
16. Stop terrorizing our own citizens with the Patriot Act. And while you’re at it, read 1984 by George Orwell and stop naming things in ways that remind us of totalitarian