Letter to President Obama - first draft

Dear President Obama:

We were extremely moved when you shed a tear with us over the senseless, brutal, intentional slaughter of 20 children in Newtown by a U.S.A gunman firing assault weapons in their school.

We were further mollified by your immediate willingness to work on banning and/or eliminating such horrific weapons from endangering the lives and happiness of our children and from circulating around our country.

But we question your sincerity and have to ask you, where were your tears when 178 children in Pakistan were massacred by U.S.A. drones firing random missiles into their homes, their schools, their communities; or the 21 children massacred in Yemen; or the countless (and uncounted) children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria murdered by U.S.A. drones?

U.S.A. drones are killing children, women and men – civilians – by your orders, Mr. President. We adamantly insist you rescind these orders and immediately cease the assassination of human beings.

Surely you sat in the same U.S.A. school classrooms and heard your history teacher explain the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship: she said “democracies engage in due process, charging the ‘bad guys’ and trying the ‘innocent-until-proven-guilty’ people in a court of law. Dictatorships assassinate people”.

Surely you should be acutely moved to summarily rescind your assassination-by-drone orders because the use of drones is vilely unconstitutional and abhorrently immoral.

President Obama, if you continue to act as if the children in other countries are merely inconsequential, if their lives and limbs are not profoundly valued, immensely important, our earth’s greatest treasures, then we cannot but suspect you do not really value the lives of the children here – for if you can kill children abroad, it is only a matter of time before you justify the killing of children on our soil.

Do not continue to break the hearts of mothers, to incense the people of those communities under drone attack, to create vengeful enemies around the world: end drone offenses NOW! GROUND the DRONES! NO MORE DRONES!!!