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.

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.

War and the Church

  It is my opinion that the blind loyalty shown by the evangelical church to the GOP and its policies (which  were then extended by  the current  white House occupant) is one of the most disastrous sentiments to take hold of the hearts of otherwise sane people. I am reminded of ‘battered wife syndrome’ in which  a woman who could do better justifies and rationalizes her black eyes and  bruises and makes her way back  the abuser who will continue on in his crimes, only now with her  consent.  I understand the proclivity in human nature to lump themselves in with this group or that group, and then turn a blind eye towards the excesses and abuses of ‘our’ group, but when people who claim to love truth, and people who claim to love life and peace cheer on the invasion and occupation of foreign lands, it is a bit puzzling.  When people who ought to know better swallow the  state propaganda and  fervently convince themselves that the enemy is who the state says the enemy is, despite the state’s track record of lies, deception and self-serving propaganda, I wonder if we have taken full leave of any discernment we might have once  possessed.

  War is broken bones and twisted bodies and destruction. It is a mangling of all that is decent in man. Even when justified, as in a defensive war, it is a horrible expression of all the dark passions of the human heart. It is rivers of blood and abuse.   Even after its cessation, its evils continue to linger on in the shattered lives of the survivors. For those to claim to be children of light to buy into this and support it with their voices, and with their pulpits, is, at best a betrayal of their calling.  I am not a pacifist, far from it, but I cannot reconcile the lies of the state with the truths I am supposed to proclaim.  I cannot be a mouthpiece for the warfare state.

  But then again, hasn’t it always been this way?  Haven’t states always done this?   One of the ways to knit the hearts of a people to yourself is through your propaganda, and when the propaganda is spewed by someone they trust, someone they have confidence in,  then half of your battle is won. The natural defenses people erect in their minds against a President or a Congress is neatly circumvented when the same-half-hearted logic is employed by their pastor.

  Let me give you an example. In the 1860’s, Mr. Lincoln conducted an invasion of the Confederacy that cost over 600,000 lives by the time it was over.  To convince people of the necessity of their children being fed into the gaping maw of death, Mr. Lincoln needed pastors who would twist scripture and toe the party line. He needed northern preachers who would lay aside their eternal calling to drone on and on about the sanctity of the Union and its preservation at all costs.  Reading through  the sermons preached at that time in  Union-sympathetic churches, I am  struck with the similarities  to the military worship that occurs in modern evangelical circles.  All  one would need to do is  devolve the grammar and sentence structure bit, and   replace the term ‘the South’ with  ‘Afghanistan’ or ‘Iran’ and what you have is the modern evangelicals position on perpetual warfare.

  A sermon preached in Boston on Thanksgiving Day 1863 serves as our first example. Entitled “The War and the Millennium”, it attempts to establish a rather odd series of parallels between the Lincoln-led Union and the  coming kingdom of Jesus Christ.  Laying that blasphemy aside, the  sermon begins with the  questions 'Can the bloody feet of battle  be shod with the  preparation of the gospel of peace?'

  It then answers itself in the affirmative, making the  feeble case that  mankind is being made better by the slaughter of his fellow man at the behest of  a Washington tyrant, a sentiment akin to 'making the world safe for democracy'. Going on for quite some time, it eventually  makes the following amazing statement: "Three hundred thousand men hastened to cast themselves into the Gulf, that union and Democracy might be preserved."   Well, technically they were drafted, but why quibble over details?

  The real gem  shows up here: "The Union must be preserved, not alone because it was essential to our own welfare, but because  through its preservation would the  divine  doctrine of popular government  live among men. If America is lost, the world is  lost." Does that sound familiar to anyone else?

 "But our passion for our country is also and chiefly a passion for liberty.  We fight for empire, for empire means democracy.  We shall  wage this war fifty years if need be, because everybody, with more or less clearness sees that it's success is  essential to the preservation of those ideas"  I had no idea John McCain was channeling this gentleman.

  Lincoln  embraced fully this  fifth column of propagandists. Matthew Brady the photographer responsible for the most compelling photographs of the  war,  reportedly said "Without the evolution of the churches' opinions, . . . it is unlikely that the president could have proceeded as he did."

  At a  service in New York in 1863, Rev. Marvin Richardson Vincent used his precious  time in the Presbyterian pulpit to crank out the following piece of sermonistic prose: "The evils we combat, have been growing for eighty years, and are not going to disappear at out word. They will die hard, and it is well; for God is testing our worthiness to enjoy the boon of liberty, by asking how much we love it, how hard we are willing to fight for it, how much we are willing to sacrifice for it: and if we shall do this work like men, if we shall fall in with God's manifest design to purge our national anthem, singing with ever bolder emphasis, until the palmetto groves, and the still lagoons, and the snowy fields of cotton, now no longer King, shall be stirred with the voice of thanksgiving."   I submit to  you that the true evils of the day were the abandonment of the founding  principles that allowed Mr. Lincoln to get away with this, along with the  compliance of consent of  preachers who  should have known better. He went on to conclude :Methinks it might reach them as they lie in their cold beds at Antietam, and Chancellorville [sic], at Donelson and Vicksburgh, at Fredericksburgh, and Chattanooga, and Bull Run, and stir their silent dust with a throb of thanksgiving—of thanksgiving, not that peace has been restored; not that husbands and sons, and fathers, shall go forth to battle no more; not that trade is revived and commerce safe; but that God has led the nation through the vale of tears, through the terrible baptism of blood and fire, to a nobler and purer national life."

  I would hope that the insanity of those statements ring true to anyone who is aware of what a very different place  America was after 1865.  Yet the same thing is happening now as  our liberties are stripped, and our treasure stolen and  the blood of  our children  spilled for no discernible benefit.  Citizenry  fed a  steady diet of 'We support our president, no matter what, he's one of us ' (an actual statement I heard  during the Bush administration) will turn a blind eye to the charred remains of fellow human beings after a drone attack while patting themselves on the back about how they 'support the troops'. It is  high time that we re-establish our discernment as a people and  realize who the enemy just might be, and  experience a  real separation of church and state propaganda.

The Greater Tragedy

The truly scary part of the events in Boston, and by extension the events like it over the last  few years, is how it brings out the absolute worst in an unthinking public.

  The news that 2 suspects had been identified and one of them had been killed by police was actually greeted with cheers by co-workers of mine.  One of the coworkers said mockingly to me “Would love to hear your take on their so called ‘civil liberties’ now.”  His position , reiterated to me multiple times over the recent past is that ‘terrorists’ have no civil rights, no right to a trial, just kill them. He has used this mental blind spot towards his own horrific statements  to celebrate the  drone bombing of innocent people in faraway lands. He has actually made the statement “It serves them right for living so close to  the bad guys.”

  So let me make myself very very plain here. A human being accused of a crime has the right to a trial regardless of what crime he is accused.   Notice I did not simply say ‘a citizen’ has that right, and I did that on purpose. My rights, and yours, do not come from a piece of paper, even if they are enumerated by that piece of paper. My rights and yours come from our humanity and a fair society will honor the rights of whoever happens to be under its jurisdiction at the moment, whether they be a ‘citizen’ or not.  To do less is to commit a crime against the accused.

  The state enjoys a monopoly on violence in many areas, and a monopoly on the ability to incarcerate.  I cannot lock my neighbor up in a cage if he transgresses against me, only the state enjoys that privilege.  In theory, to counterbalance that privilege, the burden of proof rests upon the state to make their case before a jury of my peers that a crime was committed and that it was committed by me.  If they cannot make that case, then I go free, even if everybody ‘knows’ I did it.

  When we cast that aside and we seriously contemplate extra-judicial killings for certain offenses, a couple of things happen.  First of all we sacrifice a piece of our humanity by our crimes against the accused. Secondly, that list of crimes where it’s acceptable to just ‘take them out back and shoot them’ always grows larger over time. Trials are expensive, and the system is cumbersome. It’s hard to get a conviction, and it should be, because an out of control police state is far more dangerous than an out of control bomber.

Boston

  Well now that the  gummint seems to have found their patsys, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.  It prompted some interesting  discussions here amongst co-workers, in which  NeoCon (my pet name  for him)  puffed his chest out and   publicly  gushed over the  brave  police and such that  risked life and limb to find the perp.  He  mocked me a bit saying that this incident  sort of makes null my opposition to   cameras on every street corner.  I told him I didn’t have all the facts, but my gut was that  the 2^nd  guy will never  see the inside of a jail cell. They will kill him first and claim he was resisting arrest.  He laughed a bit and told me that cops are  specially trained not to shoot unarmed people and he  would challenge  me to find  a single incident where a cop shot a suspect  just for resisting arrest.  I’m not entirely certain what planet he’s  from or what planet he currently lives on.

Sincerely Wrong

  In the wake of the  bombing in Boston earlier this week,  Susan Estrich, who by all  indicators seems to be a very nice lady,  wrote a syndicated  column that appeared  in our local  paper  entitled 'Just Keep My Children Safe From Terror'. This  no doubt heartfelt column is  such a sterling example of wrong thinking that  I felt it necessary to   address it.  She writes:
"What do we want the government to do? How  much of our liberty and privacy are willing to give up in the hopes that it might  stop terror?.....So this is my answer: I'd give up a lot.  You want cameras on every corner? Fine with me. I don't care who pats me down at the airport. Pat away. Keep the confidences of my clients, but other wise my email is  an open book. Mine my data;listen to my conversations. If it will keep my children safe, I don't care."
  I know,gentle reader ,that there are  a plethora of angles from which one could approach this  wrong thinking. I'll just throw out a couple of the more obvious ones and we'll see where this goes.
  Giving up liberty has never brought security. Ever. Our security is in our liberty. The reason is simple. Your government is more of a threat than any network of terrorists ever will be.  To entrust the government with the power it seeks is worse than giving the fox  the keys to the henhouse; its giving him the  keys, an axe,a pot full of boiling water, and a book  of chicken recipes.  To trade liberty for safety is to trade what you cannot get back for what you will never gain.
  Mrs Estrich says that she would be comfortable living in a  surveillance state, which to her would make her safe.  Never mind that the governments of the world killed  over 200 million people in the last century, a number  terrorists could never hope to match.   Even if she could  give away her liberties in exchange for safety, and even if the  state were capable of  making her safe, by what right does she impose that condition on everybody else? I for one am not  comfortable with  more power given to an entity whose very nature is rooted in brutality.  It will not keep her children safe  nor more than it will keep  my children safe. Instead she will be fitting them with the manacles of their  own enslavement while softly cooing to them that it's all worth it.  Patrick Henry must be turning in his grave by now.
  I  have full faith and confidence that Mrs. Estrich means every word she wrote. That, unfortunately is the truly scary part.