Abel Sayre Los Alamos High School
Editor’s note: The commentary below was made by Abel Sayre during Saturday’s No Kings Rally at Ashley Pond Park
In the first hours of the US-Israeli war against Iran, an all-girls school in Minab, Iran, was bombed, killing 168 people, almost all of them kids. Listen to that again, on the first day of this war, just mere hours into it, and already more than 150 schoolgirls had been brutally murdered in their elementary school. Witnesses described the scene after the attack, with one parent of a child killed in the bombing reporting seeing limbs and blood covering classrooms, and body parts and kids’ bloody backpacks being pulled out from the rubble. The U.S. and Israel both have yet to take accountability for the attack.
Too often are these massacres reduced to headlines and numbers. With news outlets in America not showing gruesome images in their articles, these attacks are sanitized. The horrors committed by this government are muted. Americans read the headline of 150 schoolgirls being killed, and don’t have to face the idea of a missile being launched into a classroom full of 7-to-10-year-olds. When you see these headlines, it’s important to remember the humanity lost.
Obviously, this is not the only massacre committed by the U.S. and Israel so far in this war. Nearly 1,500 civilians have been killed so far in Iran, including over 200 children. Residents of Iran say the official count vastly understates casualties in Tehran, where rescue operations struggle to reach victims buried under collapsed buildings. An estimated 3.2 million people have been displaced so far, mostly internally as people flee major cities for less populated areas.
In addition to the thousands of Iranians killed, 13 U.S. soldiers have died as well. Since this war is a war of choice, as Iran posed no threat to the U.S., these people are dying for no reason. Gas prices are up across the country, and billions of dollars are being spent each day on this war. Trump is spending billions to bomb little kids in Iran instead of using that money to improve schools, hospitals, or fix other issues within the country. In Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 Cross of Iron speech, he warns that any money used on war is money stolen from the American people, saying, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Trump has gotten us into an unnecessary war, a war in which nobody is profiting except for the higher-ups. Every day this war drags on, it will make Americans poorer, while enriching the military contractors who are getting paid to murder Iranians.
The United States war machine relies on ordinary people not realizing the stakes of what they’re doing. So before I end here, I’d like to urge you all to keep fighting against this war, this government, and against Trump. You can’t make change without first holding hope that change will happen.
