By Hanna Essenburg

On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” President Obama claimed that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, where 20 first-graders and six adults were slaughtered by a mentally disturbed gunman — “Was The Worst Day Of My Presidency.”

“Really?” I thought. Don’t get me wrong, Sandy Hook was a crime & a terrible tragedy, but I wondered: “What crosses Obama’s mind when he reads reports stating the casualties, including children, who are the victims of his secret drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, etc?’

The children who were killed in Sandy Hook meant the world to their parents and we grieve with them; yet as a society, we seem indifferent to the tears shed by heartbroken parents in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Perhaps the message is that some people matter more than others.

In a world that constantly insists that some of us are worthless, some of us are disposable, let’s change the message & follow the path of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said “I have a dream”, rather than the current Obama’s policy of: “I have a drone.”

Drones are making the world less secure and creating new enemies. Their remoteness provides those responsible with a sense of impunity: “We can do this, who is going to stop us? If they try, we’ll reign death from above”.

Let’s Ban Weaponized Drones from the World and share Howard Zinn’s message:

I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.

Since I mentioned disposable people earlier, I’d like to end with a poem.

***

Disposable people

 

Great minds wasted.

Disposable people,

Disposable earth,

We treat each other and the earth as being disposable –

Garbage,

 

People, the Planet.

Not taken care of — worthless.

Garbage piled up due to all our stuff.

 

Our stuff made of the blood, sweat and tears by

Workers in:

Bangladesh,

China, and…

Prison labor right here in the good old U. S. A.

 

Where does it end?

When do we say

enough?

 

But sometimes we can salvage trash

And make something beautiful…

From Garbage –

Landfill Harmonic is a film about:

Inspiring Dreams One Note at a Time…

A remarkable orchestra

From a remote village in Paraguay…

Where children manage to play

In a Recycled

Orchestra

With instruments made from

Our discarded items…

Imagine: the body of a cello made from

A discarded metal canister,

A violin made of scrap metal

And discarded wood.

 

Turning Trash into Musical Treasure.

 

The Recycled

Orchestra

Knows how to make

Beautiful music

Keep Playing,

Keep Dreaming,

Stay in the Game…

 

As the Lorax once said:

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better. It’s not”.