Forbes magazine wrote an article on the happiest people on earth. The artcle was written sometime back. I believe it was Forbes but I hesitate because it is a conservative or a neocon magazine. The article said that the Northern European people were the happiest people because they had safety nets to help them in tough times.

The loss of our middle class is a strong reason to have safety nets in America for our people.

A tragic mistake!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opinion/01herbert.html?_r=3&ref=opinion

Here are the final five paragraphs of Bishop Thomas Gumbleton's homily of November 29, 2009. Bishop Gumbleton is a peace activist cleric.

I don't know exactly how to react to that, except I remember Pope John Paul II in that last year of his life when he went to Spain on one of his international trips. It was about 10 months before he died and he was already feeling very ill; he was weakened a lot. But I remember what a newspaper report said about him when he first spoke to the Spanish people, hundreds of thousands of people, at the beginning of his visit. The reporter said you could see Pope John Paul was experiencing what the reporter called "a palpable sadness."

See, this was just after he had pleaded with the leaders of the United States and the leaders of Iraq not to go to war, but we had gone to war again. So he was filled with sadness and perhaps that will be our reaction if we go more deeply into war this Tuesday. But then Pope John Paul began to cry out, "There must be peace! We need peace in the world! We must pray for peace. Let there be peace." He kept repeating that word "peace, peace for the people of the earth," and the reporter said it was like a mantra. He kept saying, "We need peace. We must work for peace. We must build peace." That's the only way that follows the way of Jesus.

So perhaps we too, as we enter into this Advent season and we look for this new coming of Jesus into our lives and the feast of Christmas, we must plead for peace, beg for peace, work for peace, make peace the constant theme of our lives so that in our individual lives and our relationships with one another, we will always be thinking of ways we can bring peace to ourselves and to each other.

But then beyond that, let's keep on thinking of ways that we can try to influence the decisions of our nation so there will always be ways to bring peace into our world. Perhaps that's the most important thing we could do during this Advent season as we wait for the new coming of Jesus, with the reign of God being proclaimed once more in our midst, that reign of peace and justice and love and joy that we will beg God to help us to be makers of peace.

"Blessed are the peacemakers; they are the sons and daughters of God." That's what we must try to be, especially during this Advent season.

The forgotten cost of the war!!!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Forgotten-Cost-of-War-by-Paul-Rieck...

The path to peace must be the path to peace.

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2009/12/03/worlds-religious-leaders-mo...

I think we fail to understand how much brainwashing we go through regarding war, and soldiers for that matter. We see constant movies glorifying war, much violence on television about war, we're constantly barraged with others, who too, are brainwashed about war.

It doesn't stop there either. I can't think of the name, but there was a book, something like "What if everything you've ever heard is wrong." It almost applies.

Clearly many of our problematic beliefs stem directly from the media, news, entertainment, and advertising. They shape our beliefs, and for those who don't think there is brainwashing, all I have to say is they are likely the most brainwashed of all.

You can't even get folks to understand the profit-motive in the MIC, even though Cheney actually worked for a main benefactor of these wars, Halliburton,and Bush's family has been in the oil, and DOD business for several generations.

Hey, look at the fact we don't even hear about their roots on the media over, and over, and over again. That is obfuscative brainwashing. In fact, that is the kind that is perhaps the most pervasive. They just completely ignore certain issues, discussions of the death penalty, looking at the roots of crime is ignored, instead focusing on the gory end-result details, and most of all, the MIC and its connections to why we have wars.

And are soldiers that noble, are they really fighting for America, or for corporate needs? Aren't they, for the most part, just poor folks, some of them hugely brainwashed by all the rhetoric surrounding the issue? This brings me to another brainwashing ploy, the ennobling of the soldier, which is a device in and of itself, to get folks to sign up.

Will they tell you the truth--hey, join up, take a chance of being splattered, or coming back, when we'll give you the minimum care, after making you wait for months, perhaps years, and maybe even leave your loved ones with you a vegetable in a wheel chair!!

Yea, that wouldn't work too well, would it?