Ten

My daughter was biking to work today, and saw protesters with signs over a highway bridge. The signs were facing the highway, not the bike path, so she asked them what they were protesting.

The ten-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq/Afghanistan war.

TEN years.

A decade.

And where are we now?

Obviously, we are still in the war, and the war seems to be expanding into new areas, rather than being any closer to an end. My daughter and her friends were just teenagers when the war began.

I can remember that the students on her campus were the first war protesters as the attack on Iraq began. There was a lot of negative talk of that “liberal” campus and the crazy students protesting a war that had been sold to us as necessary to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction.  It seems as though there has been a mass destruction, but not in the way we were told. This destruction has been to our economy, our middle class, our children. But at that time, those students were bucking the sales pitch everyone else was buying hook, line and sinker-as my father would say.

Huh. Guess they were not so crazy after all.

The current protests that are spreading throughout the country remind me a bit of those protests. They started small. They are being derided as “liberals” with no clear agenda. Media coverage has been overwhelmingly negative.

The 99%. It covers so much. So many issues.

Ten years into a war that seems to have no end.

My daughter is so upset about it that she is making t-shirts for her friends. They are lining up to get them, and are declaring their intent to wear them. She is asking them to make a donation for the occupy wall street protests.  They are pissed. About the war. About so many things.

It does my heart good.

Go 99ers.

Ten years-much, much too long.

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