Downtown Glastonbury is a very quiet place at 7am on Sunday. The only place open was the supermarket, where we bought pies, pasties, and juice for breakfast in our room before checking out at 9. We had just enough time to grab coffee before our bus for Wells at 9:55.

Wells is a transfer hub. We came there from Bath, today we go to Bristol from there. We have an eight-day BritRail pass that we activated in Bristol, and after changing trains in Newport and Shrewsbury we made it to Chester.

Chester is a city of about 200,000, about half an hour south of Liverpool. We’re staying for three nights at Lloyd’s Guest House, a small B&B run by a very friendly Libyan gentleman.

The city itself was chosen for its proximity to Wales and Liverpool, but it had the bonus of being an ancient walled city. The walls are still intact, in fact you can walk the walkway on top of the walls around the entire perimeter. Inside the walls were the ancient abbey and the city center. We stayed in the cheap zone “outside the wall” and close to the train station, which was the best location for our purposes.

As we settled down in Chester Sunday night (October 7), we flipped on the telly on the remote chance that a particular American football game would be playing on some obscure cable channel. What we got was grainy green images with an occaisonal flash of light … the bombing of Afghanastan had begun.

Later in the week, we realized that the timing of the bombing was disgustingly deliberate. The warmongers knew that by starting the bombing on Sunday afternoon – during the weekly football games – stadiums around the country would erupt in an orgy of cheering, flag-waving, and chanting – as if this war were little more than yet another football game.

THIS IS NOT A GAME. GAMES DON’T INCLUDE BODY BAGS. REAL PEOPLE ARE DYING, AND ARE GOING TO CONTINUE TO DIE.

As evil as the attacks on New York and Washington were (and yes, they were evil), retaliation and escalation can only make matters worse. Anyone who believes that our government is telling the complete truth about what’s going on is kidding themselves, and all the people cheering in the stadiums were duped into being bit players in the propaganda war.

As we read the papers here, we see two common themes in the arguments critical of the war, and they mostly have to do with American hypocrisy. 1) Palestinians are being bullied and slaughtered by Israel continuously, and our government does nothing to make this spoiled brat of a country behave itself. 2) Even though the United States proclaims itself as the champion of freedom and democracy, it props up and supports oppressive dictatorships whenever it is convenient to the purposes of its economic imperialism.

We’d be curious to know whether these points are being raised at home. We also find it interesting that Prince George is now making demands on Israel to accommodate the Palestinians. If he had talked this way six months ago, while he was busy raising the middle finger to the world, most of this stuff would not have happened.