Podcast Update

I started my Podcast on New year's Eve, and I wanted to let my friends know how it's going.

To begin with, as of today I've had over 40,000 Pageviews. A "pageview" is either an htm page or an audio file. I have transmitted 17.13 Gigabytes of audio content. Together, Goper's Lament and 50 Ways to Dump the Dubya have been downloaded nearly 9000 times.

Thanks to all of the folks who've participated in this project so far. I'm working toward 100,000 downloads each for these two songs by Sept 11 of this year, and I think I'm gonna make it.

A Mother's Heartache

Empty Boots and Baby Shoes
By Stacy Bannerman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

I am so tired of standing at memorials for soldiers; tired of weeping for the victims of this war.

I am tired of watching parents plant crosses for their dead children, day after day after godforsaken day.

I am tired of placing flowers in empty boots and baby shoes; of the way my body shakes at the first readings of the names that were added to the casualty count this week.

What's wearing me out is bearing witness to this war. This foreverness of death, and the unrelenting loss.

It drains my spirit to meet the widow's eyes; to watch the fathers falter, falling to their knees. Christ, that makes me weak.

To stand at the lip of the mouth of a grave that will never get enough

catching mothers tears, a nation driving by the dead, is exhausting to my soul.

I am deathly tired today.

West Point Graduates Against the War

"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war." (2)

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity. War settles nothing." (3)

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion." (4)

"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government." (5)

Dwight D. Eisenhower

34th President of the United States

(1953-1961)