RIP Tomas Young.

Thank you for posting Body of War. I just watched it for the first time.
TYY

Joining the millions who followed before him.

the interests of the 1% and their pawns.

for all our Tomas Youngs.


Tomas Young at Ground Zero in 2008 (Photo: BodyofWar.com)

http://billmoyers.com/2014/11/10/remembering-tomas-young-veterans-day/

Thanks for your Op bsis.

So sad, so very sad.

All the best to his family and friends.

May he rest in peace.

May your journey be easy.

Just a note to thank George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for the unnecessary deaths of so many young Americans.

Amen to that.

thank you for your service to all Americans in speaking out against the unspeakable.

God fucking damn it

I believe in the idea that is America, but I also believe in Tomas Young, who was re-introduced to me by way of a Chris Hedges article that should be mandatory reading for every sentient American on the continent. Young was shot through the spine and permanently paralyzed during his deployment to Iraq, and later went on to be one of the first veterans to actively and publicly denounce the war...and now? Now, after a number of physical setbacks, he actively seeks his own death, but lacks the capability to do it himself, and will not allow anyone to finish things for him. So he sits in hospice and waits to die.

I believe in the idea that is America, but Tomas Young is dying because he believed, too. He is dying, and the people who delivered him to the slow sunset of his death remain utterly unmolested by the rule of law we Americans take so much misguided pride in. I live with my idea of America in one hand, and the dying light of Tomas Young in the other, and when I look in the mirror, I cannot meet my own eyes. I spent all those years fighting against everything that is ending Tomas Young's life, I made documenting their serial crimes my life's work...and then I let it slide, because Bush was gone, and I couldn't summon the necessary energy to remain outraged over the fact that they all got away with the crime of the millennium scot-free.

It is enough.

I am finished with the moral geometry that says this is better than that, which makes this good. This is not good; this is, in fact, intolerable. Allowing the perpetrators of war crimes - widely televised ones at that - to retain their good name and go on Sunday talk shows as if they had anything to offer besides their ideology of murder and carnage is intolerable. Entertaining the idea that the billions we spend preparing for war cannot be touched, and so the elderly and the infirm and the young and the weak and the voiceless must pay the freight instead, is intolerable.

The pornography of America's global killing spree is intolerable, and, by the by, I am sick of hearing about drones. A child killed by a Hellfire missile that was fired from a drone is exactly, precisely as dead as a child killed by a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache attack helicopter, precisely as dead as a child killed by a smart bomb, precisely as dead as a child killed by a sniper, precisely as dead as a child killed by a land mine, or by a cruise missile, or by any of the myriad other ways instant death is dealt by this hyper-weaponized nation of ours.

Exactly, precisely as God damned dead, and the blood is on our hands regardless of the means used to do the killing. The issue is not the drones. The issue is our hard, black hearts, and the grim fact that the debate in this country right now is not about whether the killing is wrong, but about the most morally acceptable way of going about that killing. Drones are bad, but snipers are better, because you don't hear the buzzing sound in the sky before your lights go out forever. Or something.

It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep.

I mean to face the stranger in the mirror tomorrow, and so I must acknowledge my own culpability in all this. I am to blame; I went to sleep, because I have an idea of America that I cling to desperately, and so I bought into the soothing nonsense of cosmetic change even as the sound of the same old gears ground on around me.

I am sorry.

I still believe in that idea.

And I am awake.

William Rivers Pitt | Waking From My Moral Coma
Wednesday, 13 March 2013
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15088-waking-from-my-moral-coma

May you rest in peace, Tomas. The peace you were denied for so many years by those who sent other people's kids to fight for oil.

RIP Tomas Young

Reminds me if the day I learned my cousin was killed in Iraq.

We need them.

Strength, love, wisdom to him and those he left.

he did gud to invade iWaq. he beeg war preznit! and the GW cheerleaders let him say it OVER & OVER again. no. no you did not do good.

and his intelligence and courage.
I encourage anyone who has not yet seen Body of War to do so. Especially on Veterans Day.
Condolences to Tomas's family. We share your sorrow.

So sad. Good on Phil Donahue. Good on Bill Moyers.

Eternal damnation to the war for profit bunch and their lackeys.

Good men like Tomas Young shouldn't die this way.

He shall not be forgotten.

And when I say thank you for your service, I do include the service of speaking out.