Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom.

Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how....and when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded as the rest of us

Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.

One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of preemptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding.

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.