Dear Americans, please don’t let your government bomb another country
Dear Americans,
I know you have your own troubles. You work too much, you need more money. How are you going to pay tax? Where are you going to get medical treatment when you get sick and old? War always happens somewhere far away from you. Always. And you can’t do much about it.
Always far away.
Imagine riding towards the college, crossing a bridge on a city bus and hearing this sound:
It was 1999. Nobody expected Belgrade would be bombed. It was our New York. War had always happened to some undeveloped countries far away, many of which we could not even locate on a world map. Even when it was geographically close, it seemed far away. This was fuckin’ Europe! And then it happened. Operation “Noble Anvil“. Nothing noble about the bombing, I can tell you.
Nothing happened to me physically. I wasn’t wounded, my house wasn’t destroyed. Nobody from my family got killed.
Still, for years I had something like PTSD: I was afraid of some noises. Every time someone approached me from the back and started talking to me, it would make me start. Every evening when I heard a soft sound of a train 3 blocks away, I would remember a stealth 117 approaching the location nearby in order to hit a target. It sounded just the same.
Some young pilots sat in their cabins and saw the ground below them on a screen as a video game on a computer console.
In these interventions, you are faced with the realization that your life means nothing to them. All the rich and influential, all your cultural heritage, all the celebrities, all your family, everything that you are means nothing to those people on TV giving statements about the enemy targets on a press conference far away from you.
And it goes on night after night. It is never just military targets. It is schools, buildings, markets, residential buildings. People.
And the soldiers your government attacks… They are guys aged 20, forcibly mobilized or (ironically) going as volunteer soldiers to defend their country and returning a few days or weeks after with their limbs amputated, if not killed.
They go to fight with higher goals in mind to make some loaded guys even richer. Your soldiers do the same thing.
In such interventions, they throw uranium bombs. People die of cancer for decades later. “Collateral damage“ is people, children, and hospitals that are hit as they try to destroy military targets.
The population, the infrastructure, and the economy of the targeted country always get poorer and worse. So much money is needed afterward to get on track.
Conflicts always exist for years before the NATO’s or American intervention and nobody does anything about them.
Interventions mean destruction.
People die or get damaged for good.
Wars are always about money and power.
Democracy is not spread with violence.
Your interests are not more important than the rests of people who live on the other side of the world.
There is always more to the story than what you hear on the news.
There are some things more important than social media marketing. Please, try to see how your life would be different if you had just been born in another location in this world.
Hello, I’m Maria, a Serbian translator who just wrote a children’s book. This is my website:
