No More Baby Coffins.

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We should pass a law making it illegal for anyone to build baby coffins. There is no excuse. And we need to pass a law making it illegal for anyone to do anything which will create a need for baby coffins. No more killing babies. No more allowing them to die. No more turning away from their tiny little cries and labeling them "collateral damage." Just because they're not rich or powerful does not mean we should keep killing them. What is wrong with us?

Of course that means no more war. Or, at least, none unless it is absolutely necessary to protect our country or people from the threat of imminent violence. Otherwise, no more war.

For example, when the Saudi terrorists attacked us on 9/11 (assuming that's who did it), we should not have attacked Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world. How absurd is it for the U.S. military, largest and richest in the world, to send its mighty weapons to the stone-age nation of Afghanistan where the people are so poor that they starve, and live in caves, and know nothing of 9/11 or Saudis or even of airplanes. How can we justify bombing entire villages of people who had no involvement whatsoever in the 9/11 attacks? How many babies have we killed in Afghanistan?

(15 years ago a young male American, Tim McVeigh, planted a bomb in a federal building and blew it up, killing 168 people who never knew him, never did a thing to him. The building had a daycare center in it. McVeigh made sure the bomb went off when the building, and the daycare, were full of people, during the workweek. Lots of babies murdered.)

What if we had simply gone to Afghanistan after 9/11, told them we want bin Laden and al Queda. See if we could buy their cooperation. You know -- like corporations buy the politicians in Congress, like the politicians buy hookers and cocaine, like the CEOs buy mansions and wives. Why didn't we try a transactional approach first: you give us Osama bin Laden, we'll give you money. Wouldn't that be the decent thing to do? It would have saved a lot of babies' lives.

The nuclear bomb we used at the end of World War II was supposed to be the weapon to end all weapons -- and we had it. Nobody could touch us, because we had the superweapon. Until everyone else got it. Isn't that what children do? Dream of the bigger weapon, the most powerful, the baddest of all so that we can always win the war? Children. Not adults.

(As always, in Oklahoma City we counted on our civil servants, the heroic firefighters, to try to save our citizens, save the babies.)

Now we have drones. Predators. People sit in rooms in the U.S. and look at computer screens of images from satellites. At random, they push a button and drop bombs on anything that moves. They kill babies all over Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but never even see the corpses. No baby blood or brains splatter on these men who are safely ensconsed in their air-conditioned war rooms, far from the dying, far from the pathetic little cries of the babies.

(As always, people came to the spot of the Oklahoma city bombing and left personal property items for the dead, for the babies, little things that maybe the baby or child loved. Something that perhaps magically can pass through this world to another one and send love to the dead baby, now gone, alone, never to be comforted by a mother or father again).

What's the thinking here? We can send drones from far away, nobody can stop us? How about when the other nations all get the same technology? What then? Will we all get magic cloaks to make us invisible? Will we go back to the space-shield of that demented senile old B-movie actor Ronald Reagan? Isn't it time we took weapons and war out of the hands of men who are so immature and self-absorbed that they refuse to acknowledge the most obvious truth: it's still murdering babies. Nothing has changed. Killing babies is not the work of civilized people. Or decent ones.

We need to stop killing babies. No more baby coffins.