...or in case some of us are too young to have been around when it happened, the US government LIED to the American people to gain support for bombing Vietnam.

Nearly three decades later, during the Gulf War, columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident."

Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public."

And he added: "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

History just repeats itself, and the American memory (and knowledge of history) is so thin that we just buy the lies, over and over and over again.

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war, and each war that the American government has perpetuated to further their own economic interests throughout the world has been no stranger to this precept.

There is documented evidence that the attack on Pearl Harbor could have been avoided. Yet it happened, and we went to war.

There is documented evidence that the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin were fiction, and yet we went to war.

There is documented evidence that the reasons for going to war in Iraq were false and deliberately misleading, yet here we are.

It is a difficult concept to stomach: that your government does not have your best interests in mind, only the pursuit of more power and widened influence throughout the world. And they are willing to use you, your sons, your daughters, husbands and wives...

People are nothing more than cannon fodder to shore up these conflicts and entrench the US as THE superpower throughout the world.

But that's just too much isn't it?

To acknowledge these truths is to acknowledge our own complicity. To acknowledge our own complicity would mean that perhaps we would have to rise up out of our comfort zones, out of this morass of consumer myopia...and actually do something about it.

So instead we drown ourselves in reality tv, iPods, celebrity marriages and personal drama, because it's just easier than taking a stand at the expense of our comfort.

But...our comfort comes at great expense. Blood on our hands, blood in our tanks, and death on our souls.

I, for one, would rather fight to uncover the truth. The truth IS ugly, but ignorance is never bliss. Rather, it is the stifling silence that, quite literally, kills.

But if you listen closely, the silence is being broken. Whispers of dissent are breaking through, and let me be just one of the voices adding to the growing sound...

...the sound of resistance.