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| This is Tomas Young
Screenshot of YouTube Video ‘Remembering
Tomas Young’
by Amanda Young
|
Following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center, Tomas Young wanted to defend his country. He joined the Army expecting
to fight in Afghanistan, but instead deployed to Iraq. There, on April 4, 2004,
a bullet ripped through his spine and paralyzed him from the waste down. After
more than 10 years of suffering, as a result of fighting in a war that should
have never been, Tomas succumbed to his wounds and died on November 10, 2014.
Tomas was 34 years old.
Tomas
Young’s last days, as reported by Chris Hedges, “… were marked by a
desperate battle to ward off the horrific pain that wracked his broken body and
by the callous indifference of a government that saw him as part of the
disposable human fodder required for war.”
Ralph Nader, upon the death of Tomas Young, wrote,
“In the annals of military history, moral courage is much rarer than physical
courage, in part because of the long-lasting sanctions against dissenters and
those who speak truth to power about the faults in our own society. Tomas Young
had both moral and physical courage. His example should be heeded by young
soldiers in the future who are ordered by their gravely flawed politicians to
make the ultimate sacrifice for their leaders’ illegal follies and ambitions.”
In Tomas’ “Last Letter,” a letter addressed to George Bush
and Dick Cheney, speaking on behalf of all others who have suffered a similar fate,
he wrote the following: “We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been
abandoned.”
So have all of us been used, betrayed, and abandoned. Our
government has sold us a bill of goods in order to gain our support for their aggression.
Instead of providing for our needs right here at home, the American people have
been abandoned for the sake of waging never ending wars in order to bolster or maintain
corporate profits, and in particular the defense industry profits, derived from
them.
But because of our lack of moral courage, and sometimes our gullibility,
we the people let wars and the lack of care for our veterans happen without sufficiently
effective opposition.
Tomas, for that I am so sorry.
Copyright © 2014 Horatio Green
