Posted by CODEPINK Staff
Here lie the dashed hopes, concerns, crushed dreams and disappointments of nearly 2,000 Americans. They made it to the inbox of White House officials through our handy dandy tool. 30 minutes after sending the alert we received a call from the White House. Read Jodie Evans' report of it here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My daughter (15) and I continue to go without health care coverage and live far below the poverty level due to a layoff and unemployment. I am glad you signed the unemployment extension, but MORE MUST BE DONE. We need health insurance!!! We need dental insurance!!! We need increase in income limits for food stamps and benefits in CA!
I have been a hard-working woman for all of my life and gladly paid my taxes to support a country I feel proud to live in. But we need change -- the kind of CHANGE you stood for and can stand for again. We need it now ... not 2 years... not 4 years... WE NEED IT NOW.
Sincerely,
Deborah Lotus Allen
***
Mr. President,
I absolutely disagree with your Afghanistan troop build-up. When my husband returned from Vietnam he wanted to sleep with me and a gun. When he died, aged 33, no cause of death was found.
The war has come home at Fort Hood and Lakewood and in domestic abuse increases and war does not bring peace.
I cannot imagine how the people of Afghanistan are surviving. War just leads to more war. If war worked, it would have worked by now.
I suggest investing in dipolmacy and development.
-Susu Jeffrey
***
Has anyone asked the Afghan people if they want us to continue killling them? The Taliban are no danger to us. They are not international terrorists. They have pretty much severed their ties with Al Queda and they do not share idealogy or goals with them. They know very well that if they came back into power in Afghanistan, and let al Queda have a haven there again, we would bomb them and invade them again. They are not stupid.
But we are. We keep repeating and repeating the same insanity, with the same empty rationales, over and over again. Everything you said in your speech was bogus. You seem to be as unable to change the machine as anyone else has been, and so you have succumbed to it. You cannot even articulate an honest, realistic description of "the job" "success" "victory" anymore than Bush could, because there is intelligent definition. As long as we are in their country, the Afghans, including the Taliban, will fight us. Not because they are terrorists, but because we are invadors. You know that as well as I do.
It is too sad.
-Friend Rufo
***
MY FAVE:
You were not just elected class president last year, so your obsession with being "most liked" by the most people, over any other consideration of policy, is more than a little obscene.
You have failed the critical test of both a Commander-in-Chief, and of a man: In escalating our eight-year-long military effort to subdue or occupy Afghanistan you have demonstrated neither judgment and integrity nor courage. You have sentenced to death countless Afghans, Americans and others, on our side all duped over and over again by the cynical, high-powered sales pitch attached to our disastrous misadventures in the Middle East, a war which may well be fatal to the republic itself, all to save your political image.
-Arthur Wagner
***
Even though I live in New Jersey, I went to Ohio to campaign for you, in the belief that you would bring a more enlightened foreign policy to America.
I now feel betrayed, and believe that I wasted my time supporting you.
-James Fusco
***
When I heard you repeat the 9/11 mythology on TV my heart sank, because I know you know it's a lie, but a lie you think you have to pretend to believe and go along with. You are a bitter disappointment, and will only be a footnote in history--another corporate jerk fooling the public to do the banksters will. Sigh.
***
Obama. There's such a thing as being "too late," as MLK warned. Be now. Be courage. Be for us. Be not for corporate oil/gas/coal and defense machines. Be a father. Be for children, schools and universities. Be for parks and swimming pools. Be for jobs and living wages and food on the table. Be for roofs overhead and safe streets. Be for renwable energy and clean air. Be for fish and frogs, not poisoned by acid rain and pesticides. Be for children in dirt villages where U.S. tanks roam. Be for stopping cluster bombs. Be for returning Iraqi refugees to their homes. Be not for dominion. Be a peace maker.
-Sharon Rose
***
The warmongers and generals want more war. War is lucrative and profitable. You promised us change and we are still waiting for SOMETHING to change. Guantanamo is still open. Transparency is a myth. The war Iraq is still raging. And now more troops to Afghanistan! If I didn't know better, I'd think Dick Cheney was still in charge. I am very disappointed.
-James York
***
Anyway, we need this money at home. My husband has been unemployed for over a year and we'd have no health insurance except I have it through a job as a university professor, even though I'm retired and lost over a third of my retirement money in the last year. Still we are far better off than most of my fellow citizens. Take care of our own children, elderly, incapacitated, and the soldiers already wounded in these appalling wars — and don't get any other U.S. boys and girls hurt!
(Dr.) Sandra E. Drake
***
I am sadden and outraged by your decision to send more of our children to kill other people's children. There is no military solution to the present situation. Stop the killing and destruction so that we can engage in real nation building where all of humanity will be able to live in peace and nations will learn war no more.
Eve Tetaz
78 years old
Wasington, DC
***
PLEASE LISTEN TO THE WOMEN, THE MOTHERS AND GRANDMOTHERS. THERE IS A KIND OF WISDOM THAT SHOULD WEIGH IN MORE HEAVILY THAN MILITARY ADVICE.
-Connie Hershey
***
Instead of sending 30,000 troops, how about sending 30,000 Peace Corps workers? That would employ some of our own, work on building up the Afghanistan infrastucture (helping create jobs, building schools and hospitals), and maybe the culture would move toward self-sufficiency and have less hatred of us. Fight hate and terrorism with love and constructive help!
-Karen Snyder
***
Our war in the border regions is being fought by drone assassinations. A man at the control sits in front of a screen in Las Vegas, and fires when he has a certain shot. To a primitive mind (but not only to a primitive mind), this experiment on a country not our own has the trappings a video game played in hell. But the procedure was here embraced by the president in the antiseptic idiom of a practiced technocrat. He gave no sign of the effects of such killings by a foreign power out of reach in the sky. To assassinate one major operative, Baitullah Mehsud, as Jane Mayer showed in a recent article in the New Yorker, 16 strikes were necessary, over 14 months, killing a total of as many as 538 persons, of whom 200-300 were bystanders. What comes of the reputation of policemen in a crime-ridden neighborhood when they conduct themselves like that? And what makes anyone suppose the reaction will be less extreme when the policeman comes from another country? And yet, from the president’s West Point speech, one would not guess that he has reflected what our mere presence in West Asia does to increase the enchantment of violent resistance and to heat the anger that turns into terrorists people who have lost parents, children, cousins, clansmen, and friends to the Americans. The total number of Muslims killed by Americans in revenge for the attacks of September 11th now numbers more than a hundred thousand. Of those, few were members of Al Qaeda, and few harbored any intention, for good or ill, toward the United States before we crossed the ocean as an occupying power.
--Brad Martin
***
I am a woman veteran (1957-1968), and I resigned after almost 12 years because of the stupidity of the Vietnam War. Be smart. End the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and (God forbid!) anything we are doing to Pakistan! Keep the peace and spend $2 billion a year NOT on one soldier in Afghanistan, but on health care, energy conservation, renewable energy and job creation. Until then YOU HAVE LOST ME AS A VOTER.
-Anonymous
***
Dear President Obama,
I believe your decision to send more troops to Afghanistan is so misguided, inhuman and immoral that now I regret I voted for you. John McCain could not have done worse. If you do not change course soon, you will be presiding over a bankrupt country with unhappy and unhealthy citizens.
Just think about it. Wouldn't you rather be a hero?
Ann Marie Saidy
***
Please do not send our children off to die. Woud you ever do the same to yours?
-Catron Booker
***
Mr. Obama, it's time to earn that Nobel Peace Prize! Bring the troops home NOW and stop the senseless bloodshed!
-Sue Edward