We were supposed to be better, brighter, peaceful….but here is where it all went wrong.

These are just a few events that affected this decade for the worse:

November 2000 – Iraq refuses weapons inspections proposals.
January 2001 – George W. Bush becomes the 43rd president of the US and with him the violence starts.
February 2001 – the British and US attempt to disable Iraq’s air defense network by bombing them.
June 2001 – an American missile hits a football field in Iraq, kills 23, wounds 11.

September 11 2001 – NY’s World Trade Center and The Pentagon are attacked. Almost 3000 are killed.
September 12 2001 – Israel starts a new operation in West Bank.
October 2001 – US invades Afghanistan.
October 26 2001 – President Bush signs a document that will invade American’s privacy – The Patriot Act.

October 2002 – G. Bush is authorized by the Congress of the United States to do whatever he pleases in Iraq. The real misery begins.
October 2002 – Iraq War Resolution is authorized.
October 2002 – The United Nations Security Council unanimously approves UN Security Council Resolution 1441. Forces Saddam to comply.

November 2002 – Iraq agrees to Resolution 1441 and weapons inspectors begin their investigation.
NO weapons were ever found but they did find lots of oil.

January 2003 – an international group of volunteers leaves London for Baghdad to act as voluntary human shields, hoping to avert a U.S. invasion. No result.

February 2003 – Global protests against Iraq war: More than 10 million people protest in over 600 cities worldwide. Well, all these people apparently didn’t know what’s best for the world, which leads to the next event.

March 2003 – Even though no weapons were found, the 2003 invasion of Iraq begins.

April 2003 – U.S. forces seize control of Baghdad, ending the regime of Saddam Hussein.

July 2003 – Evidence of the Iraq Intelligence Commission being not so intelligent after all, comes to light.

July 2003 – David Kelly  (a weapons expert in Iraq, who also found no weapons of mass-destruction there and assure Iraqi people there will be no war) is found dead.

December 13 2003 – Saddam Hussein is captured by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division.

February 2004 – The CIA admits that there was no imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

March 11 2004 – Simultaneous terrorist attacks, with bombs in 4 rush-hour trains in Madrid, kill 190.
Things start escalating.

And so it goes on…

2009 was – like all the other years since 2003 – a year of war, a year of death and just a few successes.

In ancient times, wars used to be about women, about conquering new lands and settling there.
Remember Helen of Troy? Remember Alexander the Great? I know! It was about big egos and owning as much property as one could.
Since then, one thing changed; women lost out to oil. Helen of Troy would be shocked.
Today, we just destroy a country and kill its people, then take what’s not ours. Oh yes, we kill everything with or without a weapon because we are more comfortable with being greedy than being diplomats.

What started between 2001-2003 as a war on terror, it soon become a war about oil, a war so bloody, a war so confusing that it affected every one of us at some level.

Who counts the costs and casualties of war these days?
The total body count of the war in Iraq was estimated in 2008 at over 1 000 000. Some say more, some say less.

$948,152,980,800 (and counting) were invested in Iraq and Afghanistan. See here The Cost of War.
(This number must have an influence of how the US economy turned out.)
See more stats here: Iraq War Facts, Results & Statistics at December 10, 2009.

On top of that, we have the casualties in Gaza Strip, West Bank, Pakistan, the random suicide bombs around the world, the so many killings done by today’s dictators…. natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Jeanne, earthquakes such as the one on December 26th 2004, starvation and diseases in undeveloped countries.

That’s a lots of dead people!
I could go on with all this.

BUT, while we can’t help the natural disasters from happening, we can prevent political disasters and bad decisions of attacking other country than the one that actually attacked us.
You’d think the Holocaust taught us something….Wouldn’t you say so?
Oh wait, it actually did. We killed 10 million people less and we gave the prisoner camps fancy names, such as Guantanamo Bay which looks to me like a very modern Auschwitz in an exotic country but without gas chambers, and, we had CIA prisoner camps build all over Western-Europe. So fancy!

We also didn’t gas any of them or put them to make the bullets we’re about to shoot them with.
Nah! We just tortured them because we have so many companies who die to sell us ready-made weapons.

Please, forgive my sarcasm and my comparisons. It’s just so horrifying and ugly.
A “then and now” is not fair. It never is.

We were supposed to be better. We knew we could, but it takes one person to misuse and abuse the power.
It takes a system to bring down a world and a world to change that system.

This decade was supposed to be about us becoming better human beings, but we became worse than ever.
This decade, each and everyone of us had his/her own agenda and every time we came together to make a better world, we really didn’t accomplish much.
We just showed off at benefits concerts, G summits…whatever summits, but with no big result.
Maybe i was blind and i didn’t see the good things happen, but the numbers above still have my full attention.

We just showed our faces for others to think we are good and decent, but looking back to 2000 not only we’re not good and decent, we are all responsible (one way or another) for failures, for the lives of those who died, for sitting and watching, for claiming neutrality when we were incapable to say “Yes” or “No”, for destroying our world when we could have made it a better place.

This decade, just fewer people showed compassion for the human kind, interest in development and evolution, but our sense of drama overshadowed their accomplishments.

And now, you are about to enter 2010.
Ask yourself how you feel about the last 10 years. Be honest with yourself.
You can pretend you are not a part of this, you can pretend you were powerless and voiceless, but this would be a rather poor excuse.
When you witnessed something wrong and you keep your mouth shut and your head down, and if you also advise others to do the same, it’s not only wrong but it’s where we stop being humans.

Nothing will change what happened these past 10 years. Nothing! Not even our change of heart to do things better from now on, because the trail is too long, with bodies on it, blood, murders, failure, disappointments, poverty.

I could blame it on Bush. It’s mostly his and his advisors fault, but it takes a great number of followers to accomplish something like this. It also takes fear.
People often forget that a government exists to serve and answer to the people, not vice-versa.
When people are scared of their own government, own security and their own president and are taken into custody for even questioning their leader’s intents ( Feds at the door…anyone?), that makes it look to me like a regime.
They all have their own way to do it. [ http://www.parade.com/dictators/2009/]
It happened before under Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, (more here) some nastier than another.

___
A personal note:

Dear mister Bush, can you see the impact you had on the last 10 years?
You broke the rules of the Geneva Conventions and the following International Human Rights laws –  Art.5, Art.9, Art. 11, Art.12, Art. 13, Art. 17 and Art. 30. Yeah, you’re such a warrior!
Putting warfare aside, did you ever say sorry to those you’ve hurt, that had nothing to do with your war, with your obsession?
Did you ever look at the images of the children blown off all over the streets? Or at the images of their mothers carrying them back home to burry them, but with missing arms or half of their bodies?
That’s what you did and the soldiers you sent there couldn’t disregard your orders because you would have them court-martialed.
To me,  you are a horrifying person, sir!
May you grow a conscience that big, that you will never be able to sleep.  
____

You, my dear reader, can judge me for my words and feelings, you can be angry at me and you can hate me. You have the right to feel any way you like, but this is the reality. I am not making it up.
It’s my helicopter view of this decade.

The fact that this reality looks so ugly to me is not because that’s how my truth looks like, but because somewhere in my mind and heart i wish  for peace and stability and my ideal world doesn’t look anything like it is now.
We were supposed to be better, brighter, peaceful….and that’s what went wrong this decade. That’s my legacy and yours too.

I wish you all a peaceful and beautiful 2010 and i hope that by 2020 we’ll grow wiser and we’ll be able to look back at the last 10 years with pride and satisfaction.