Good Intentions Pave the Way to Somewhere

  I have, in my circle of associates, some very well-intentioned people, who , by their good intentions often miss the bigger picture.  I feel wholly inadequate at the job of explaining the bigger picture, but here we go.
  A very nice lady  who attends my church sent me an email that was supposed to be a  real tear-jerker and a 'salute' to the  military. My  particular flavor of church tends to be very patriotic and  very supportive of  the military in general, so it's no real surprise that she would send this out.
  The email begins with  a series of pictures of a handsome young man and his  cute blond girlfriend. There they are, glowing with happiness. 

 A few pictures later, he is   in unform, wearing his EOD pin.  There are shots of him in some dusty corner of the world with fellow EOD  guys, looking sternly into the camera.  Then there are  photos of him laying in a hospital bed, tubes and  bandages all over him with  no hands and  no feet, a casualty of some sort of explosion in that dusty part of the  world.

  The photo series shifts to shots of him in physical therapy.

The cute blond girlfriend is there, her eyes fixed on him, trying to impart some of her willpower to him as he  learns to use his prosthetics.  They are both trying so hard to be brave in the face of all this, and from a  human perspective, the whole thing is  quite touching. 
 The  pictures show  various shots of their travels together. He hooks his stubs around her neck and she carries him like a  backpack as they  go  from place to place, still smiling, still trying their best to be brave.  They marry, and the pictures show the  brave young married couple, carrying on despite the enormous burden of his shattered body.


 
For this I am supposed to be thankful.  I am spposed  to be thankful that young men like I used to be are wiling to go to the  dusty parts of the world and  get their limbs blown off so that I can be free.  I am supposed to be grateful that  this young man and his pretty blond wife aren't bitter towards what  was required of them and what will be required of them for the rest of their lives.  I'm just having a hard time swallowing it.

  Let me ask you this question, gentle reader; how did this help?  I understand that his life is now worse, but how is my life any better because of his sacrifice?  What part of my life and  what freedoms that remain can I point to and say 'his limbs helped buy that'?  I mean if one guy with no  limbs makes it good, wouldn't a mountain of men with no limbs make it better?  Wouldn't my life be just as good, and his life  much better, if he had stayed home? Is that part of the  world where he left his arms and legs safer because of  what happened? And how would you prove that?

  I know what my reaction is supposed to be, per the mindset of the  email sender. I am supposed to be grateful.  I'm supposed to reflect on the sacrifice made.The emotion I find myslf feeling however, is great  sorrow at the  pointlessness of it all, and a neccesity to  somehow apologize to what   the  ambitions of misguided and sometimes evil men did to this man's life.  But not only  do I lack the ability to feel what I'm 'supposed ' to feel over this, I feel most of the time that I lack the words to say to  sincere people who  just don't see it.

Hold Your Applause

  Monday was Memorial Day and in addition to the various  signs  and  placards and banners  that I saw  thanking  me for my service, we happen to be in the middle of camp-meeting at church, and all of us veterans  were asked to stand wherein we received a hearty dose of applause and a ‘thanks’ from the pulpit.  Off to my right was seated a visiting pastor who looked over at me with such admiration that an honest-to-goodness real life hero was sitting in his very midst. It was all quite embarrassing.

  Now I don’t claim to speak for all veterans, only for myself. Please stop.  I served six well-intentioned years in the United States Navy where I made multiple trips to the Middle East.  We were there to enforce various UN resolutions against the country of Iraq. I  didn’t like the UN  then, and I don’t like them now, but there I was,  going hither and yon at their bidding because the officers appointed above me and the President of the United States thought  that was a  worthwhile use of my time..  Was it dangerous? Certainly. But nothing I did, in my estimation earns me any sort of annual applause in perpetuity.  I’m not a war criminal, but certainly not a hero.

 In our congregation we have a person who has 4 purple hearts and a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry for actions performing in the late 60’s. Wounded on 4 separate occasions, he not only carries physical ailments from his time overseas, but is continually privy to mental anguish.  What do I make of a day set aside for him? What do I think we owe him?

 Regardless of what you think about that particular overseas venture ( I think the American people were lied to and we squandered the lives of perfectly good men for no good reason) this  one thing I do know; that nobody really fights for freedom in a war.  A man put in a combat situation isn’t fighting for freedom or liberty. Such concepts are abstract to the point of pointlessness when other armed human beings are shooting at you. He is fighting for him and his friend’s lives, and although this seems to put me a bit off the libertarian reservation, I think that fighting to preserve the lives of your friends after having been put in a horrible situation by your government is an act that carries with it a certain amount of gallantry. Trying to get everyone   home alive in the midst of chaos and bloodshed is an act of bravery.  Trying to maintain your humanity in the face of orders from disgusting authority has a bit of nobility to it.

  But what I think is owed like my friend is an apology.   Someone owes them an apology for how their blood and their humanity were sacrificed to line the pockets of well-connected profiteers.  Memorial Day ought not be just a day of hero-worship, it ought not be a blank check of gratitude extended to anyone who wore a uniform, it ought to be a day of reflection, and repentance and apology. Every Memorial Day we ought to recommit that we won’t send good men off to die for no good reason. We ought to resolve that we won’t buy the lies of the state when they drum up yet another boogieman to frighten us into giving up our sons to the ravenous jaws of the war machine. We ought to purpose within our hearts that we won’t let  ourselves be manipulated into blind obedience to the  latest crop of flag-waving politicians who  will happily send out children off to an early grave while  mouthing empty slogans like ‘Freedom isn’t free’.  No, its not free. In fact, the way   things are set up now, their definition of ‘freedom ‘ is not only  free, its ridiculously profitable.

  So keep  your applause, I didn’t earn it, and if you feel compelled to  observe Memorial Day,  observe it with prayer that we as a people wake up and   stop the perpetual madness.

Rand is not Ron

  I was doing a radio interview recently regarding SWINDLED, and the host asked me what my impression was of  Rand Paul, the  junior Senator from Kentucky and heir-apparent to his father's philosophical empire. My response was simple , "I have Rand issues."
  Trust me, I've heard all the arguments in favor of the Rand Paul "libertarian when I need to be" philosophy. I've heard how he needs to "play the game" in order to "get anything done". Well that certainly implies that we need government to get anything done, doesn't it? I thought we  held that  liberty and freedom and individuals were the solutions, not partisan politics. I don't 'need ' Washington. All I 'need' them to do is leave me alone, a simple task they seem incapable of doing. Compromise  is what  got us where we are now, isn't it?
  I've  been pointed towards some of the  brave stands he has taken, such as his  drone filibuster. That's all  fine and good, but I would like to see a little more consistency in the man. He  has supported sanctions against Iran, which his father  claimed was an act of war.  Since Iran seems to be the new neocon litmus test, Rand's willingness to play  political games with the lives of other people's children seems to me to be  at odds with his  libertarian soundness in other areas. His last name isn't enough for me to give him carte blanche enough to hide in his father's shadow.
  A perfect example of my Rand issues came to light   in the Senates  recent unanaimous vote to  push us one step closer to war with Iran. The media has already started to portray the regime as Enemy of the Month, and already the  average amn on the street  is being programmed to think "We gotta do soemthign about those guys".  Trust me, unless something drastically changes, I  completely see us  parking  ourselves in yet another  country, toppling the regime, and   spilling  precious blood and  squandering  precious treasure in an attempt to control what happens afterwards.  This apparently is what we do now.
  I assume Mr. Paul ( the younger) has presidential aspirations, and maybe he saw how his father was shut out by the  establishment and he seeks to  endear himself   to the establishment while keeping his liberty  street cred.  But I  submit to you that such a tightrope act is not only impossible, but unwise, and won't win him any points with me.
  Rand, its not too late to  change course. Some of us are still watching to see how you turn out.

Terrifying Math

  Fort Benning is  a military base in Georgia several hours from where I live. We pass through there on occasion  on our trips west, and we have been known to stop at the Peachtree Mall there in nearby Columbus.  I do my best to be observant , and strolling around the Peachtree Mall last time we were there, I noticed something; missing limbs.  Over and over again I saw young men in their  20's that were missing legs and arms, casualties of  our military expenditures overseas.
  That got me to thinking. Let's say, just for arguments sake, that there really was this incredibly savvy, well-funded global network of terrorists out there.   Let's say this imaginary group had sleeper cells and training camps and  state support, in other words, all the sort of things we have been told to worry about.  This phantom organization of steely-eyed jihadists decided to finally bring the West to its  knees, and they plannedd on doing so by detonating a variety of devices in the 10 most populous American cities (New York, Los Angeles ,Chicago, Houston,Philadelphia, Phoenix,San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose) and  to do it all in one day.  This gives them a potential target pool of  23,831,986 people.
  This assumes a lot of things. This assumes that  they actually  are trying to kill people as opposed to simply creating terror. After all, as recent events show, you can potentially bring an entire American city  to martial law with some modeling clay and an alarm clock with a bunch of wires sticking out of it. You need not produce a working device to get the job done. In fact, you don't even need savvy steely-eyed jihadists, you can have incompetent boobs as your front men, and the knee-jerk reactions of the American police state will terrorize for you.  But I'm getting off the topic.
  So our crack unit of terrorism types, seething with hatred at how  'free' we are, decide to   attack the 10 largest cities in America.  Let's also say that they chose as their definition of success the attacks of September 11, 2001 in which  around 3,000 people perished. Ten attacks in  ten cities with a casualty count of  3,000 per city. Now even a public school graduate like myself can figure out that the body count, were they successful ( and why wouldn't they be?) would be around 30,000 people.
  That  would be horrifying. That would be terrifying. That would be  heartwrenching. That would surely  shut the mouths of those silly libertarians and their rants  about the 'Constitution'. That would also be 0.001% of the population of those cities.
  While our bearded terrorists chortle with glee in their caves at their historic accomplishment and await the surrender of the  evil west, let us consider that the death toll in Iraq of U.S. military personnel is over 4,000 and when you count the losses in Afghanistan, you wind up with around 7,000 dead  American military personnel.  Now the cost of war  doesn't stop there, as we have to address the 32,000 or so wounded, some of whom are limping around the Peachtree Mall as we speak.  If we are really being intellectually honest, we have to factor in the  over 300 journalists that have been killed,  the almost 1,500 contractors that have died and the  300 plus  other coalition troops that  have been killed, and the 100,000 Iraqis that have been wounded.
  Then there are the 'bad guys'.  The US government's track record with drones has been horrific, with some organizations reported that  over 80% of the deaths from drone attacks are innocent bystanders.  This policy, accompanied with our occupation of Iraq has produced a mountain of bodies somewhere in the  neighborhood of 1.4 MILLION  men ,women and children.  Add this all up and  you get a very conservative estimate of 1,541,000 dead or wounded as a result of our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan (not counting Libya, Syria, etc).
  Now let us rejoin our world-class terrorists in their cave.  Despite being at the top of their game, with a sinking feeling they realize the desperation of their cause.  While they spent all their time and all their resources to score an unparalleled victory over the west, they would have to do this same event 48 times in a row to equal the sheer rivers of blood our misguided foreign policy has accomplished. They could never hope to cause the grief and  sorrow or inflict the damage  that we have done to ourselves and the countries we've invaded in the last  10 years.  They wipe away tears at they come to the full realization that , in the world of  real terror, they are  just rank amateurs.