[Air-l] peace

[Wendy Robinson]

Cincinnati is unproudly as conservative as Seattle is liberal for reasons I 
don't want to go into (we can start with race relations and a proactive 
police force though).  Nevertheless there have been war protests here, the 
local independent weekly is full of outrage, folks on campus seem as 
anti-war as ambivalent (only a few people I've talked with are solidly 
hawk, and they are undergraduates who haven't experienced war).

What I find uncomfortable in the mainstream media is how quickly a chilling 
effect has settled in.  Even those democratic senators speaking out about 
Bush's lip service at "diplomacy" a few days ago likely will quiet down 
now.  The press has to cover the events and not be perceived as 
unpatriotic.  But if anyone is likely to kill or be responsible for the 
death of Americans now, it's Bush.  And those servicemen and women (and 
innocents, if there are terrorist retaliations) have extended families back 
home who want to believe in the president and feel pride in their efforts 
on behalf of the country.*  Those families are voters.  So it will be 
interesting to see who in Washington is still willing to speak up, even 
this time next week.

I copy and paste from the close of Bush's Orwellian address to the 
nation:  "My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will 
be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work 
of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others. And 
we will prevail."

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Wendy Robinson                       wgrobin at uc.edu
Asst Prof, Dept of Comm              wgrobin at fuse.net
Univ of Cincinnati                           homepages.uc.edu/~robinswg
620C Teachers College, ML #02-0317           tel: 513-556-4468
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0184                    fax: 513-556-0899
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At 12:01 PM 3/20/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Message: 1
>Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 14:19:47 -0800 (PST)
>From: david silver <dsilver at u.washington.edu>
>To: air-l at aoir.org
>Subject: [Air-l] peace
>Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
>
>i attach a few preemptive apologies to this post: apologies if the topic
>strays from what some believe to be appropriate discussion areas for the
>list, apologies for leaping to a soapbox to exclaim a personal position.