Wounded Knee Wounded Me

Candy Minx posted a thought provoking piece this week, which affected me deeply. Her topic was the new HBO movie based on the book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. As she described the impact this book had on her it woke memories of my own first encounter with it.

I read this book in Jr. High. It broke my heart and woke me up to the relevance of current events and their roots in history. The headlines at that time providing context for this reading experience were: Watergate, Vietnam, Kent State and Wounded Knee 1973.

I was as devastated by the realizations that Presidents lie and that the reasons for war are seldom the noble ones a government claims them to be as I was by Dee Brown's description of the slaughter of whole families by soldiers. To this day, all talk of war evokes images of dead babies clutched in the arms of their dead mothers and bloodstained hands overflowing with coins.

Security, Liberty or Justice for a people not their own are seldom reasons enough for any government to invest in the expense of war. Whatever the commodity du jour or the rallying cause du jour somewhere, someone is pocketing a profit in wealth and/or power.