Progress Now Action

I saw this movie Stop-Loss over the weekend and it blew me away. The term refers to what happens to a soldier after he/she has put in the contracted time and then is still sent back to war for more tours of duty. This is happening, presumably, because the Bush administration does not want to begin a draft. So in order to maintain troop levels, the same courageous men and women are being sent back, whether they want to or not.

These people signed up to serve their country, showing their honor with their actions. Are we serving them by dragging them back into combat after years of good service?

The Vietnam War became unpopular enough for people to stand up and speak out. Family members, friends, and acquaintances were being sent overseas, making the war closer to home for more people. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fewer families and communities of people are being directly affected by the tragedies of war, keeping the reality of these wars and their unconstitutionality just out of sight.

With the majority of the media that we consume consolidated into just a few hands (over 50 in 1983 and 5 right now), only a handful of people decide what we see, hear, and read about the war, perpetuating this problem of no information. If our local paper, TV station, magazines and even state level papers were independently controlled, just think of the diverse perspectives we would have access to!

I don’t want to read the same stuff that everyone in the country is reading. How are we to inform ourselves as responsible citizens if most of the media have exactly the same content?

These soldiers deserve to be heard. We owe it to them to learn of their sacrifice.

Tell the FCC you want diverse media, instead of corporate media. Tell your Congressmen to stop the FCC from allowing more consolidation. For more information, go to www.ColoradoCommonCause.org .