Bundy Phries

I remember well the first times using my fake ID at the Phyrst Pub on the Florida State University campus. I think it must have been 1990. I was around 20 at the time. The Phyrst was a Tallahassee landmark. Aside from being famous for the ridiculous amounts of beer drinking by under-aged fraternity boys and sorority girls, it had also been the spot where Ted Bundy stalked a few sorority girls in early 1970's. He bludgeoned two of them to death as they slept I believe. Not a landmark to be proud of.

I've had two eery experiences in the Phyrst. The phirst was the night Ted Bundy was executed. Some of my friends took the trip to Stark, Florida to stand outside the gates as the mans life was taken from him. They drove with white shoe polish signs on their car windows....Fry Ted Fry. The Phyrst pub, where he first conjured up some of his earliest and most hideous atrocities, celebrated the man's death with free Bundy Phries, instead of the ordinary french fries. I found that experience horribly bizarre. The entire town wildly celebrated his execution with a vengeance I don't remember experiencing again until after September 11. It scared me then. It scares me now.

The second time was that night I first used my fake ID. That night the United States invaded Iraq in the 1st Persian Gulf War. I was walking my girlfriend home after a rowdy celebration in honour of 'our' army's righteous invasion. She cried all the way home, deeply upset about the fact that we were going to war. I didn't really understand her then. And maybe I really didn't until I came to Bosnia a few years later.

It was my time outside of the states when the veil of American 'righteousness' not only dropped to the floor, but the wind took it, hung it on a thorn bush and mother nature slowly tore it to pieces. It made me angry then. The highway of death where 10,000 Iraqi's were mercilessly bombed by 'my' troops retreating from Kuwait. The later released book by the former American Ambassador to Iraq admitting that Daddy Bush gave the green light to Saddam to invade Kuwait. The 'training' camps in Georgia, no less than 100 miles away from where i spent my innocent university days, that educated the death squads that wreaked havoc in south and central america in the 1980's. Vietnam. Korea. Panama. Nicaragua. Chile. Afghanistan.

The naive image of my country willowed away. I was an angry young man, to be quite honest. And many things still make me angry. I have been able, though, to put many things into perspective. And like the title of my blog page, i certainly have the intent to understand all sides of every coin.

So maybe I should get to the point, huh? I have witnessed the ruthless and brutal destruction of this country. I have held children without arms and legs in my hands. Held the hands of dying women. Carried the bodies of killed men. My young, hippy, anti-war ideology was thoroughly reinforced by the Bosnian war. It's just flat at wrong. Any way you put it. No one can convince me otherwise.

If anybody knows what war is, it is us here in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet in the past 13 years since our electricity has been turned on, the shelves at the shops fully stocked, the water flowing from our taps....the anti-war sentiment and any sign of war resistance has essentially vanished into thin air. Not only have we not taken to the streets to oppose the violence inflicted upon the Palestinians, Lebanese, Afghani's...but we have even sent troops to Iraq -- and are damn proud of it! Now i know that they are mainly de-mining units that are part of the 'coalition of the willing' but hey, it's a war that the entire fucking planet has opposed (except us of course). And yet somehow we are patting ourselves on the back for sending troops to an illegal, immoral and horribly brutal conflict that has robbed the children of Baghdad the same childhood's that were stolen from the children of Sarajevo, Mostar, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Goradze in the early 1990's.....and, oh, does the list go on.

So my question is -- why on earth are we so damn apathetic? Why do we care so little when hundreds if not thousands of ordinary people dropped their lives to protest the war in Yugoslavia...and many who even came to help and lost their lives for a cause they believed in? I know we don't have a tendency to oppose much of anything, except during whiny cafe sessions where we complain about everything under the sun. But have the haunted souls of this place not taught us any lessons? Is there a single politician that has opposed Bosnia and Herzegovina's participating in an inhumane war (if there are any humane wars to speak of)? Have any of us ever written a letter to say, 'what the hell are we doing sending troops to Iraq?'

As the US election year churns up heated issues that dominate the American conscience -- the Iraqi war is certainly weighing heavy on the hearts and souls of many Americans. And for that I am at least grateful that a growing number of people have come around to realize that we have been duped by Bush and his fascist regime. We have spoken, and continue to speak....hoping to be heard in 2008.

I know we here in BiH are cursed with a million and half 'important' issues...and perceived important issues. Police reform. Constitutional reform. The Kosovo crisis. Privatisation. Highway robbery of the country's natural resources. Stalinist Heco. Nixon-like Silajdizic. Mussolini-like Dodik. Capone-like Covic. They keep duping us...and we keep doing nothing about it.

But can we honestly say to ourselves that our pitiful politics leave us so emotionally barren to be able to muster a reaction to our pathetic participation in the Iraq war? If not, where are our voices? If so, we are in bigger trouble than i thought!

peace