Iraq War

Too Much With Us

April 26, 2013
By Mickey Friedman

I took Peter’s advice and bought clear packing tape to patch the major cuts and bruises of my sign, then went back out to demonstrate this past weekend. Peter, as he often does, took a short break from his retail duties to join me.

Peter has been one of the best things about my weekly manifestation. Like others who have known war up close, it is always with him. He has known profound loss and his empathy and understanding, his spirituality, is so very hard earned. His impatience with bluster and rhetoric and hyper-inflated patriotism is also profound. It doesn’t take much of it to get him going.

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Treason

April 4, 2013
By Mickey Friedman

My “Support The Troops / It’s Time To Come Home” sign has seen better days. I’ve taped and re-taped it; stapled and re-stapled it.

This Saturday a big wind blew it and me several feet, bending us both. But I really don’t want to make a new sign. To acknowledge I’ll be standing out in front of Town Hall long enough to justify the effort it will take to make a new sign.

Google says tin and aluminum are the appropriate gifts for a tenth anniversary. So ten years later, should we send the Iraqi people our tin foil and aluminum cookware? It’s got to be better than shock and awe. The destruction of their middle class, the disintegration of their families, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods.
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The War’s Not Over

Mickey Friedman
January 7. 2012

Few Americans know about David Emanuel Hickman. The media jabbers about Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum and neglects David Emanuel Hickman.

After attack in Ramadi, Iraq 2006, U.S. Army photo: SFC David D. Isakson

For all their rhetoric about standing tall and tough and fighting the fight against Islamic extremism, the politicians do their talking surrounded by the trappings of wealth and power. They are the 1%. They are safe. David Emanuel Hickman went out to do their work and died. The Defense Department says he died in Baghdad on November 18, 2011 “of injuries suffered after encountering an improvised explosive device.”

The Army Times called Hickman “the last American fighter killed in combat” in Iraq. To our ever-lasting shame, Hickman will be remembered by his family and friends in North Carolina and by those who watched him playing outside linebacker for Northeast Guilford High School, but will never be known by the American people. There will be no parade past Wall Street for David Emanuel Hickman nor for Marine Pvt. Jonathan Lee Gifford, our first casualty.

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A Million Faces

By Mickey Friedman
November 7, 2011

This Sunday morning, after an hour of serious shoveling, I was able to get my car to Fuel for my Sunday latte.

My deepest sympathies to our Great Barrington pear trees which fell overnight, victim of our premature nor’easter. And an apology to those who said the trees needed to be replaced. Nature voted with you. And it’s time to pick more wisely. Maybe trees with no leaves and no limbs.

Great Barrington Pear Trees vs October Snow Storm - Photo: Hayley Weller © 2011

Anyway, this was one of those deadline-approaching-mornings when I had absolutely no idea what to write about. But lucky for me, the Berkshire Eagle was handy. I began reading in the Entertainment Section about my friend, local potter Daniel Bellow. According to Eagle writer Jeremy Goodwin, Bellow’s decision to replace writing editorials for the Eagle for making beautiful porcelain pottery, was motivated “by a sense of the newspaper industry’s decline.”

Jeremy’s words made sense. So naturally I turned to the Opinion page to read the morning’s editorial for an up-to-date status report on Daniel’s replacement. For some reason, the Eagle never credits its editorial writers so I don’t know who’s responsible for some of this silliness.
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Local/Schmocal – Debt/Schmebt

By Mickey Friedman and the Red Crow Economic News Team™
July 27, 2011

Our crack Red Crow Economic News Team™ has been busily at work trying to come up with a new definition of “local.”

Do your eggs come from here or there?

The local debate has been raging for more than a week now as Berkshirites try their best to come to terms with the news that despite displaying a “Berkshire Grown” sticker, the Otis Poultry Farm has been selling eggs that come from a farm in Schuylerville, N.Y., 50 miles away.

As far as Andrew Pyenson, co-owner of the Otis Poultry Farm is concerned, that is local enough. According to a story by Ned Oliver of the Berkshire Eagle, Pyenson has an answer for people who ask to see the birds: “I say, ‘No, they’re on another farm.’”

So the question is, are people being truthful when they claim to selling or serving locally grown food? Or put another way, how local is local?

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US of A: 466.666 times safer than Canada?

Well we should be. According to a report in The Economist we spend that much more than the Canadians on defense.

In fact we spend more than the next 17 countries on the list combined.

We spend 6 times more than the Chinese, and they’re next on the list.

According to the Swedish International Peace Research Institute:

the share of US GDP devoted to the military—the ‘military burden’—has increased sharply, from 3.1 per cent in 2001 to an estimated 4.8 per cent in 2010

As for the real wars we’re fighting, we’ve spent about $783,074,577,031 in Iraq and $423,157,514,489 in Afghanistan. Of course, these figures have increased in the time it’s taken me to post this and for you to read it.

Click here for the most up-to-date estimates.

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An online newsmagazine based in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, Red Crow News covers what's happening and what we hope will happen.

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