Existential Ennui

~ Searching for Meaning Amid the Chaos

Existential Ennui

Tag Archives: Veterans

The Conversation We Need on War

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Sherry in Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

American Exceptionalism, History, Military, Veterans, War

Refugees Fleeing ISIS Offensive Pour Into Kurdistan This is not a post I wish to write for a lot of reasons. Mostly it has to do with the fact that I recognize that my opinions here are not in line with the average American and that I have loved ones and friends who will and have disagreed with me in part or in whole. I don’t wish to insult, cause pain, or infuriate those I care about, but important issues do not benefit from pretending they don’t exist.

This all started, or should I say restarted for me with an editorial I read in the NYTimes yesterday which I urge you to read carefully here. It refers to the fact that some veterans really don’t appreciate being thanked for their service and that opens a whole can of worms for me.

Because this promises to be long, and you deserve to understand from whence my opinions germinated, let me go back to the beginning.

War is not something new of course but is as old as human relationships. As we gathered into groups, we inevitably? found war as the way to solve issues between groups. I question the word inevitable since the jury is still out as to whether we are innately prone to solve our problems this way or not. Suffice it to say, we’ve taken the easy way out, the simplistic approach since we began to record our lives as “civilized”.

I am of that generation whose grandfathers were eligible to fight in the “war to end all wars” and our fathers fought in the conflagration known as WWII. Those were both “righteous” wars by all accounts, fought from a necessity we all accepted. My father was a WWII vet and so was my closest uncle. I assumed, without actual knowledge that all of my friends fathers were veterans too. I to this day don’t know which were and which weren’t.

The generation of my father did not talk much of war, it was indeed their overarching psyche not to. My father did not belong to veterans groups for the most part. But the country did take its responsibility to take care of its vets very seriously. The GI Bill followed quickly at the end of the war, and that was accompanied by a social security law that ensured a decent old age. Unions rose dramatically in the years following and with them came salaries that paid a living wage, and pensions to bolster that social security. Veterans once in positions of power made sure their health care needs were met with Medicare in the sixties.

These efforts, directed at least in large part to show our thanks to veterans was shared by most people and embraced. Republicans lagged behind in these efforts, but even they soon were loath to not support them as well. Such happens as the result of righteous wars.

This is what it meant to “support our troops” back then.

I grew up watching war movies, at least until about the age of 15 or so. I had no particular feelings about war other than that they were sometimes necessary and that that men did some scary stuff that I was glad not to do.

Vietnam was “my” war in that I came to adulthood during it. Quickly we came to realize that it had none of the clean lines of demarcation. From the beginning it was mired in questions. It would take years if not decades before we saw it clearly. America had been on the wrong side. Ho Chi Minh was in fact the hero, and America had been propping up a corrupt puppet government that as usual was supported for “doing our bidding.”

We would go on to do similar if less costly (to us) interventions in South America.

I ended up by the time I was nineteen or so supporting draft dodgers and draft card burners and marching on an occasion or two to stop this war. I read books about war, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and Aristophanes Lysistrata. Later I read Colonel David Hackworth’s About Face: The Odyssey of An American Warrior.

I was forever changed in my opinions regarding war. I see them today as but temporary fixes that contain the seeds of new wars, and that this posture is endless. I see them as the easy solution when we are not brave enough nor thoughtful enough to do better.

I don’t pretend to be a total pacifist for I recognize that unbridled naked aggression must be met with more than words. But at the same time I’m not sure what the standards should be for determining “just” war. I do believe it should be the last resort rather than the first. I recognize as well that no soldier can hide behind “orders” to justify his/her behavior in a war theatre and thus don’t buy the “war is hell, never question what they did.”

We live in a polarized time where some try to reserve patriotism to themselves. They do this by defining some rather strange things as patriotic. It ends up being words more than behavior in my opinion. Sarah Palin explained to us that people who don’t wear flag pins aren’t patriotic. That is surely an opinion I suppose, but hardly one I want to identify with.

Politicians all wear flag pins, and often spout the words “support our troops”. Plenty of people fly flags as if this is patriotism. If you know me you know I do not relate to any of this.

Borders seem artificial constructs of humans designed to preserve resources mostly. In my view, the future can only result in a remove of such artifices and the institution of policies that favor use of shrinking resources for the benefit of all humanity. World government must inevitably replace nation states.

Thus to me, reliance on archaic terms such as national pride and homeland and so forth serve only to point out our differences rather than seek our commonality. Supporting our troops, more the banner of the politician, ends up being nothing more than a call for a larger army with more armaments. I find it all decidedly unhelpful in a world that shrinks daily and becomes more intricate.

During my war crisis (Vietnam) we knew that most of the boys sent to fight the designated enemy were not there by choice. The draft is no more, at least not now, and so perforce I must admit that all soldiers are soldiers by choice today.  But they are far from being all the same.

Some are there through a genuine desire to “fight for our way of life and to avenge those who kill Americans.” I can appreciate their actual belief, however short-lived it may be, as heartfelt. One can, I suppose, thank them for their belief, however wrong it may be to some of us.

Some are there because life circumstances offers them little in terms of a future. Poor boys and girls find themselves with few options to a better life, and the service has always held out that carrot of education and training as a way out of poverty.

Some were raised in the tradition or not, but feel that all things being equal, this is a good career choice. And that of course is their right.

Others are there because the other option was jail.

I am told, but do not know, that in the midst of battle, soldiers fight not for country or “so that you don’t have to” but solely for each other, as the series Band of Brothers pointed out so well. Such emotions are no doubt noble and right to those who face death.

But since I am not of the persuasion that most wars are necessary, and certainly not these wars of late, I find myself in some quandary about what this thanks is for. Why should I thank the one who deliberately chose to do this thing that I do not agree with? For in the end, wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq arguably have made life here in the US more dangerous rather than less so. Simply the number who hate us has grown exponentially.

There is a movie I believe called What if They Gave a War and Nobody Came? It became a popular slogan during Vietnam. One must ask, what if? It might be that the government would re-institute the draft, but Vietnam proved how powerful a populace can be when it sets its mind against the will of a warmongering government. So is it not legitimate for me to argue that you have no right  to expect my thanks for doing what I deem ultimately doing more harm than good, both to my country and to untold other human beings?

Why should I thank you for doing what you chose to do for your own interests (which I may or may not sympathise with) and which harms what I perceive as legitimate goals of this country?

And who are you to complain of me? The ones who will most vociferously are those who wave flags, wear pins, and speak of supporting our troops. You are also the same ones who support your local congressperson in voting no for food stamps, improvements in the VA and veterans benefits and unemployment benefits. Yet, significant percentages of veterans need food stamps, and they comprise something like twenty-five percent of our homeless. The VA is unable to adequately care for the tens of thousands who return wounded or who like my husband retain injuries not obvious to the casual observer. Yet you do not “support” them in these tangible ways.

So please save your criticism and look in the mirror at your own failings. As the writer of the NYTimes editorial said, you can’t get off the hook for you utter lack of being involved in war by such a simple trite means. Face the fact that unless you or yours was an actual soldier, you haven’t suffered one second for all this killing, and you haven’t thought about it either, other than to issue forth your platitudes.

Some of us bewail this killing, and the victims are not only Americans but Afghanis and Iraqis just for starters. The list gets longer as we have to also bear some responsibility for the killing done by Middle Eastern peoples to each other because of our meddling throughout the region. And we sit in our homes and schools and places of work and dine on steak and watch football, and all the other niceties of life in America while millions suffer for what is being done in our name and in the name of those we support.

We have reaped the whirlwind and now face a group of men and women who have no fear of dying to bring about an ideology they believe in no matter how insane it actually is. And if we don’t come to some equally compelling ideology to counteract it, we will find ourselves ill-equipped to save humanity from itself.

It is clear what the war hawks are selling. It’s what they have sold since the days of Thermopylae.  The question is will we ever see beyond the spear, the catapult, the tank, the bomb and the sniper?

I’m not asking you to agree with me. I’m asking you to dialogue. This is the human conversation that needs to be  held. I am offering no solutions because I don’t have them. But I do believe that we owe it to our children and their children to make the attempt.

All I can do is promise a veteran this: I will honor every dead man and woman killed by war. I will vote for every improvement in VA services and benefits. I will do my best to find real solutions to hunger and housing, and will vote AND PAY TAXES to support public assistance to all in need. I will vote in elections to support peaceful solutions over war. And I honestly truly am deeply sad for your suffering whether it is apparent to all or hidden in the recesses of your mind. I will be a voice for the voiceless. I will seek to help make all boats rise.

We are better than this. We have to be.

 

 

 

 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Tales in Humility and Gratitude

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by Sherry in Crap I Learned, Editorials, Essays, Inspirational, Life in New Mexico, Life in the Foothills, poverty, Veterans

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

poverty, Veterans

CampHopeThere is little that grows in Hope City. It is too hot and dry. There is a small “community garden” that sits adjacent with a few struggling plants pleading for moisture. A lonely and very tiny apple tree grows alongside, producing miniature fruit.

A wigwam sits in the center of this small community, encompassing no more than ten tents. We are told that four of the ten are veterans.

We have come to meet Bob and Mary, two residents. We read about them in our local paper and I soon realized that the location was behind the food pantry and soup kitchen.

We went to see how we could help. Bob and Mary, so it was reported, had a couple of pups and we hoped perhaps we could at least help with the dog food bills.

We were met with smiles and invitations to “come sit on the porch”, a small enclosure made with plastic, and bits of wood that supported a billowing covering against the slow drizzle that was falling. First real rain since last summer as we recall. The dogs were excited at seeing somebody new but soon went back to digging in the soft earth, smelling every few seconds.

Bob is the veteran, having served during the early 70’s. When he was denied a hardship transfer from Germany home to be with his dad who was ill, he turned in his papers and left the service. Mary had raised three kids in Kentucky, moved to Florida, and was happily employed at a good paying job and had a nice home when she met Bob.

They fell in love, married, and life seemed good until one of Mary’s daughters called and told her mom she needed help. Mary quit her job, sold the house, and they headed to Kentucky only to find upon arrival that the daughter had reunited with her abusive husband and their help was no longer needed.

As Mary put it, things just seemed to fall apart after that.

The ended up traveling to Las Cruces because of job offers. Those offers fell through when it was learned they had no car. The car they had? Well that was repossessed when Mary got ill and, although they had paid off a good two-thirds of the note, the car dealer wasn’t interested in giving them a bit more time. The car was repossessed.

So they found themselves in Hope City. Their tent was big enough for a nice air mattress and not much else. Three portable coolers kept their water and food. No cooking allowed, too much of a fire hazard. No electricity.

Even with all they endured they had found the compassion to seek out these two woeful looking mutts and give them some semblance of a home. The smaller of the two had been found in a ditch with all her legs broken and two ribs, a batch of still-born pups still within her. She was a happy tyke now, as was the other larger one. Both had elements of terrier and goodness knows what else in their lineage.

Mary was a full-time student at NMSU on a Pell grant. She has applied for disability SSI and they are hoping.

Bob is 63. He gets work as a day laborer whenever he can. Mary is a year younger.

We found out what the dogs liked to eat, what they might use most, and left with promises to return on Saturday.

We went to lunch at a fairly upscale Italian restaurant and then on to Lowe’s to pick up a new microwave, since ours had conked out earlier that day.

As we moved from lunch to shopping we discussed how best we might help these two and the others Hope City.

Later at home, the Contrarian walked in after some time and looked at me. “You know, we lived pretty tight for a lot of years in the meadow,” he said softly. “Yet, it wasn’t the same. We knew that we would sell the farm and reap a benefit, and live very well after that.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “When you know it’s not forever, it’s not so hard, and well we never lived like Bob and Mary. I would be terrible at living like that.”

His eyes, moist, he too nodded. “I can’t imagine being in their shoes.”

And we can’t truly.

But we looked at each other in those moments and I know we both felt the same thing. Utter humility. For they had “lived right” by anyone’s standards, making no more mistakes than we all do. We choose the wrong mate, the wrong job, the wrong career. Some mistakes we can fix, some we live with, some cause us pay heavy prices. But we don’t expect to end up living at the age of 63 in a damn tent.

Nobody deserves this.

Yet, Bob and Mary are often lumped into that group of lazy folks who just enjoy the “good life” on the government dole. One of the patrons at Camp Hope was in his 80’s. He too was a veteran. He finally agreed to go to a facility operated by the VA when he got to where he could no longer look after himself. That’s a hell of a way to end one’s final days.

We first thought to take dog food with us. Then we remembered that taking away choice is a mean thing to do to people who have nothing. I hear lots of anecdotal stories about how the “poor really don’t want food”. The story is always how they asked for a couple of bucks in lieu of the half eaten pizza so magnanimously offered. It’s always about seeing the poor buy things “they shouldn’t”. We know what they should eat after all. We aren’t poor are we?

We don’t bring soap either. The Contrarian becomes livid at that. People always want to give the poor soap. People don’t want to smell poorness. They don’t want to see the dirt of poverty. Clean up and I’ll feel a lot better about doling out the lunch I think you should eat! Keep back, don’t touch me. I don’t want lice!

If such a scene doesn’t make you feel small and mostly useless, I don’t know what will. If it doesn’t make you feel grateful for all the stuff you take for granted, than you have a heart of stone.

You really don’t have to do a lot. Most churches collect food for the poor. Every town larger than one thousand probably has some sort of food pantry or informal mechanism for helping those who need it. Just do something. A lot of small somethings make a big impact. It really does.

By the grace of God, fate, and any of one thousand choices we all make, go any one of us. And just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it won’t.

I’m nobody special. I don’t do enough. I have too much. I live life well. I am not a saint, nor am I working at all hard to become one. I’m just exactly like you probably not as good. But I can’t live with myself and do nothing. And that makes me human. And being human is a good thing. We are all in this together.

 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Post With Three Titles

10 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by Sherry in Bush, Essays, Humor, Sarah Palin, Satire, Veterans, War/Military, What's Up?

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

bureaucracy, George W. Bush, Politics, Sarah Palin, VA, Veterans

Title #1

“Meet My Brother in a Jar”

Oh George, we had two blissful, blessed years with your mouth shut, and there ya go, and spoil it. Hawking a book, and spewing such ignorant crap. If you wanted history to treat you more kindly, this was not the way.

I have not, and will not read the book. I did not watch the interviews, though one gets a fair amount of their content on cable news and from the MSM.

The following are the gems, so it seems to me, showing conclusively, that G. Dubya Bushie is still clueless and proud of it.

The shocking revelation that mama Barba Bush decided it was of some importance to preserve her miscarried foetus in a jar and to show it to young Dubya tells us that Dubya didn’t acquire his insanity solely on his own. Baba must be some piece of work.

If that don’t creep you out immediately, well, I don’t know what will. Surely he claims that said experience forever shaped his attitude toward abortion and so forth. Hmmm, more likely it seared your tiny conscience with images that scared the poop out of ya, and forever made you feel all icky around dead things. ‘Splains your avoidance of Vietnam. Too bad sending young men to die didn’t register.

It apparently didn’t make him feel any compassion and/or empathy toward anyone’s pain either. He seemed eager to talk about waterboarding, and when asked why  he felt it was okay, his response was swift and akin to a child who has made a perfect pooh in the toity–“because the lawyers said it was legal!” He looked at Matt with such self-satisfaction at getting the answer right, that one can only assume his “handlers” had drilled that answer into his poor head a thousand times.

This comes in contradiction to his claim to “not watching any TV” but spending time on the Internets reading alternatively the WSJ and the bible. Apparently the bible reading, never elicited any questions of morality or “what would Jesus do?” as to waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation.”

Lastly, Georgie tells us that the lowest point in his presidency was when Kanye West called him a racist. Matt squeaked quietly, “not Katrina?” “not no WMD’s?” I don’t know if he tried to clean it up, the point is, his knee jerk response was a personal insult being the lowest point in his eight years at the helm of the nation.

I was prepared to view this man with some sympathy, knowing as I did how he was manipulated by powers much smarter than himself. But, no, George is the evil SOB we had come to see him as.

#2 “I’d Be in It to Win It”

As things shape up so far, it appears that we are gonna have Sarah around with lots of hot and funny sound bites for a full two years. She’s not going to waste any time learning about issues, she’s just gonna run off her mouth with “shakin’ things up” kinda talk.

A couple of days ago, she promised to ‘splain to us about the economy, especially Bernanke’s plans to buy up a lot of treasury bills. Sarah of course knows only about her Saks bill, but no matter, she plunged right in.

She started off by talking to us real people by telling us that “we all know how supermarket prices have skyrocketed.”

Problem is, they haven’t, food prices have gone on only 0.6%, a really really low figure. When this was pointed out to her by a writer for the WSJ, she castigated the guy for not reading his own publication, citing a WSJ article as proof that she was right.

Except that Sarah didn’t bother to READ the article, which said that so far prices hadn’t risen, but they may be poised to begin. They didn’t.

So for all her smart alacky retorts, she is still wrong. None of this will be absorbed by her brain-dead followers however, for they only listen to her smack down, never the truth.

But the one that literally makes me fall over in laughter is an excerpt from a speech she gave in PA. In it, she pondered whether she would run in 2012. She noted she would have to “see the lay of the land, the landscape you know,” she mused. And further, “I wouldn’t be in it, ya know, just to shake things up, just to debate the issues of our day–I’d be in it to win it!”

Ya see, our Sarah, has no command nor intends to acquire any command of the issues. She is there to win it for the glory and prestige of winning. Of being the winner! Of living in the big White House, with servants and AirForce One! Lordy, what a piece of work that woman is.

#3 An FBI Swat Team Nearly Descended on the Meadow

It took all my fortitude, all my patience, all my tightly held mind to keep from screaming into the phone–“DO YOU PEOPLE NOT WORRY ABOUT SOMEBODY SHOWING UP AT YOUR FRONT DESK WITH A DAMN GUN?”

I knew if I did, the FBI would be notified, and we’d be gettin’ a visit. So I held my tongue. Nay I glued it to the roof of my mouth.

Why you ask?

Have you ever in your life tried to work your way through the bureaucracy of the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: to wit: the VETERANS ADMINISTRATION?

I have, and I have the scars and the nightmares to prove it.

Simply put, I wanted to move the Contrarian’s primary care from Iowa City, to a satellite here in Cedar Rapids. They invite us to do that. A week and half later, I was no closer, and had talked to some seven different people, each of which contradicted the one before, and sent me in a circular pattern that exhausted my fuel and threatened to crash my brain.

It came down to “we can’t make an appointment until the file is transferred” by one office and “we can’t transfer the file until you make the appointment with them” from the other. It’s a no-win. Finally one poor woman made the call for me, and secured an appointment.

It is truly amazing that more VA Hospitals aren’t attacked by crazed people. After all, there are a ton of Vets with PTSD and other mental illnesses that are service related. The Contrarian tells the story of the guy who in frustration went to his truck, returned with a chain saw and sawed the front desk in half. He did time, but I bet he was satisfied!

Well, I seem to have worked out another build up of high anxiety and F R U S T R A T I O N. Have a good one now.

Related Articles
  • Why Dubya is wrong to bloviate on torture (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
  • The WSJ Reporter Who Was Blasted By Sarah Palin Responds (businessinsider.com)
  • Dubya: Worst moment; Kanye West on TV saying George didnt care about black people (politics.ie)
  • Sarah Palin Shreds WSJ Reporter For Not Being Able To Read His Own Paper (businessinsider.com)
  • The Great Wall Of Sarah (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
  • WSJ Reporter Sudeep Reddy: “This Palin woman has her facts wrong”…..Sarah Palin: “I got them from YOUR newspaper” (minx.cc)

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

War, Good God, What is it Good For?

02 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by Sherry in Afghanistan, Editorials, Iraq, Veterans, Vietnam, War/Military, World Wars

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Iraq, Veterans, Vietnam, War

It may come as a shock to you to know that I am a pacifist. I hold no truck with war. None. I find it an ugly waste of life.

I am not a patriotic person by nature. I don’t understand artificial national lines of demarcation. I figure you farm where food grows, and you manufacture where factories make sense. Anything less makes no logical sense.

War never ends war, never has, and never will. Within every war are the seeds of the next one, and the next, and on and on.

It has been said that these interminable wars we now are engaged in, are real only to the actual soldiers and their families. The rest of us remain largely untouched. That is probably true. But it probably always has been like that. We fail always to see the deeper and more subtle costs that effect us all.

I read many years ago Normal Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.  He won the Pulitzer for it, and well he should. I never felt the same way about war after that. I learned there is no glory, no adventure, no honorable patriotic pride. There is only blood, sweat, insects, rot, disease, discomfort, pain, mental distress and death. Nothing heroic or noble, just putting one foot interminably in front of the other, marching into the jaws of death.

I think it speaks volumes that most veterans don’t talk about their war. It is too horrific, too vile, too inhuman. The fear they have is, I suspect, the revulsion they might find. My father never spoke of WWII, except to point a time or two, as he gazed at his company yearbook, “This guy got shot in the gut right next to me. He died.” On some beach, somewhere in Italy. Somewhere in some far off land.

I’ve been reading Tim O’Brien’s extraordinary book, The Things They Carried. I found it on a great books list, and thought my husband might need to read it. He cannot stop reading it, re-reading passages again and again. My husband wasn’t a grunt, he flew on helicopters, yet O’Brien’s poignant vignettes of life in the bush of Vietnam ring so true that he finds common ground aplenty.

I’ve read about half, and there are times I want to set it down and not continue. So raw and so frightening are the feelings. Time and again, I cannot relate to the behavior of young men living in such hell. I try, but I fail to understand. I would guess they would act one way, and they don’t. My husband understands, but I do not.

The book is so aptly titled. For he speaks of what they carried common to them all, water canteens, rations, M-16’s, ammo. But he then goes on to speak of the more personal things, the letters, the rabbit’s foot, the pair of pantyhose of a girlfriend, a deck of cards, a bible. And then deeper still, the fears, hopes, dreams, terrors that each carried in varying degrees.

One line I shall never forget.

“They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”

Vietnam was a war of the draft. Boys were called up. Damn few chose to go. Most did about everything they could to avoid it. College was a safe place to be, but grad school was not. The state army reserves was excellent, but the waiting lists were huge. Conscientious objector status was good, but you really had to show a history of such beliefs before being drafted. Boys sometimes pretended insanity, or homosexuality to escape. And then there was Canada.

O’Brien almost ran. He drove to the border, he fought his internal battle for a couple of weeks. In the end, he says, he was not courageous, he was a coward, he went back home, to report for boot camp.

You see, it was the embarrassment. Better to die in a war you did not believe in, wanted no part of, than to face the embarrassment of family, friends, town. Embarrassment that one couldn’t stand up and do the manly thing.

Ironic, that the draft captures the young. The eighteen through twenty-something. Exactly before young men have found themselves, their self-ness. Still so locked into peer pressure, and wanting to life up to expectations of what others desire them to be. It’s an ingenious system that works, most go like lambs to the slaughter because they cannot bear to be different. Thought cowardly.

So they go. And they die. Or they are grievously wounded. Or they see and participate in horrors the likes of which we who have not drunk from this cup, cannot imagine. We would recoil, we would move away. We would relegate such as these to leper colonies, these no longer quite humans.

So they don’t mostly speak. They live among us, with their terrible memories. With guilts and tears unshed, with fears of cowardly acts, of monstrous visions. Of death, of more blood than any animal slaughter house would conceive.

Of the smells, awful rotting human flesh, the charred remains of villages, of once sweet smells now gone rancid because of associations. The sounds, that make fireworks at home on humid July nights intolerable. The same for backfiring cars. The sounds of helicopters rotate through the mind and recall the sinking feeling as one is propelled downward into a free fall crash.

These are lifetime memories. Never to be escaped. And they forever color and mutilate lives, shrinking the scope of opportunity. Forever icing over the heart. Always the need to protect the raw pain that is ever present, though often softened by drugs and alcohol or any other addictive and repetitive behavior that numbs the senses.

And since we, the unchurched in such affairs, don’t understand, we all too readily are willing to defer to the crazy minds who still think that war is an answer. And so we don’t rise up in anger and indignation and demand that this hell stop. We tell ourselves it is unfortunate, but necessary.

And it is not necessary. It is simply humanity stuck in a rut of pain giving and receiving, back and forth like some crazy swing set. And I weep for all, for all who are ground up in this endless meat grinder.

**

The lyrics to Edwin Starr’s War, can be found here.

For a poem about life at Landing Zone Betty in Vietnam, read Gary Jacobson.

Peace

Bookmark and Share

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

How to Celebrate Solemnity

26 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by Sherry in American History, Essays, Sociology, Veterans, War/Military

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

American History, celebrations, Memorial Day, Veterans, War

picnicAmericans may truly be the only nation of people who can find it somehow right and proper to combine a solemn honoring of our war dead day, with picnics, the beach, camping and barbecue.

I don’t know how we do it,  but we do. And we don’t seem to see anything odd about it.

Now, before you get your knickers in a twist or whatever other bodily wear the image brings up for you personally, I’m not here to wag the finger. No such thing at all. I was happily munching on a brat-dog yesterday and shoveling down my world famous potato salad. (I can say world famous because I published the recipe a while back–and it is undeniable that I have an “international” following of sorts. “Famous” might be quibbled with, but it’s my blog, so you know what that means.)

But the thought did wander through the fog of my brain after having consumed such fare, that well, it was all a bit strange after all. We are not supposed to be celebrating at all, rather we are to be properly solemn. I’ve used that word three times now, so you know it figures prominently here.

We are supposed to be “reflective” and meditative aren’t we? This is called MEMORIAL day after all. We have a lot of memorials to remember doncha think? I mean, starting with the Revolutionary war, various internecine “wars” against Native Americans, such that we nearly wiped out whole tribes. They there is the French and Indian, (the Indians again), the war of 1812, the parties of who escape me now. (So many it’s hard to remember all of them.) San Juan Hill had us in Cuba or some place, and we fought Mexicans over Texas and probably Arizona and New Mexico and California some.

Then there are the biggies, the Civil War when we did our best to annihilate each other, the two World Wars, one of which was wrongly claimed to be the “war to end all wars,” then Korea, Vietnam, a couple of Gulfs, Eastern Europe over those “not real wars but just police actions”. There are two going on now, and plenty dead and maimed from those. There are undoubtedly one’s we don’t know about, sneaky CIA type operations where people die and we never know. They are war dead too I guess.

My point is not to make judgments about all these, although most of you might assume correctly that I’m pretty much agin’ such things. My point is to well, point out, that we have a lot of dead to reflect upon. A lot of lives lost, millions, in causes deemed righteous and not so much. A lot of lives ruined that aren’t all that susceptible to figures and grafts and totals.

I’d say there is more than enough for a body to spend the day in quiet reflection on; war, and how we get in them, and more importantly how we can avoid them. To say nothing of those poor folks who are dealing with it firsthand, visiting graves still warm from shovels of dirt not yet packed down, embracing boxes filled with dreams now dead. 

We have somehow found it right and good to turn this day into the “kick-off to summer” and parades where we wave flags and look about us in self-satisfied wonder at all America has wrought. Kids running and ice cream, and baseball, and pretty teen girls flirting with bare chested boys trying to look manly.  A lot of aging men, and increasing more and more women, dress in semi-formal military fare, and sport caps identifying them as VFW, and their particular part in the ongoing mayhem that has been with us since our birth as a nation.

We dutifully watch the TV during the day, or later in the evening, and see the solemn (now four times) placing of wreaths at various monuments, watching the documentation of this going on here and there throughout the country. We feel vaguely embarrassed or guilty that we don’t attend those events, but after all, we have no war dead to mourn ourselves. And it is warm and sunny, and there is a chance to wear shorts and wiggle our toes in the sand and laugh because we have the day off.

I found it ironic that the television schedule during the weekend was filled with old war movies, and war footage. Yes, a perfect legacy of war is to watch pretend war or film of real war. Fitting to remember the dead that way. Glorious, in fact. I’m sure that’s the way they felt about it, before. . . . before they were dead before they hit the ground. How much they were willing to “give that last measure.” Yeah, sure they were.

Nobody is talking of peace. I can’t figure out why. Haven’t we seen a belly full of death and destruction yet? Are we still in love with John Wayne, and “lace ’em up tight boys.” Are we still in Rambo mode?

I wonder all these things as I eat my Klondike Bar in celebration of Memorial Day. Damned if I know why I feel so phony.

Bookmark and Share

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

For Those Who Gave the Last Full Measure

25 Monday May 2009

Posted by Sherry in Poetry, Veterans, War/Military

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Memorial Day, Poetry, Veterans, War

18335026-soldiers-cryingMemorial Day

Death makes brothers of all soldiers.
Those who lay down their weapons.
Beside their own caskets.
Should be allowed peace from the/
nationalistic/militarists attitudes.
That placed them there.
Shouted prayers for peace/
Would be a more fitting tribute
To those who have fallen,
Than beats of drum,
Or blare of bugle.
What better sign of homage could be given,
Than for all living,
To join hands and say as one–
“You have taught us
VIOLENCE IS WRONG.”
I sob with frustration
When I think of my own failure as a warrior.
The insufficiency is not
That my mates and I did not win.
Individuals can neither win nor lose wars.
They only survive or die.
Our inadequacy is/
We are unable to create an attitude/
That insures peace.
More than cheers of welcome,
I wanted an end to violence
When I returned home from Vietnam.
As a young man, I narrowly wanted/
Only for the savagery/
Of my time in combat to end.
As I age, I wish more and more,
For the surcease of all brutality/
For all people.
One need not don a uniform,
Or learn to drill,
To be a warrior.
My dictionary defines the word as–
“one engaged or experienced in combat.”
Combat is–
“Strife or turmoil.”
I count as comrades all who despair,
Because of conflict or defilement.
The small children who suffer hideous crimes/
From those who mistreated by neglect.
And all in between who have experienced/
Anguish.
I no longer choose to appraise misery.
There are no commonly valued units of ache.
Agony can only be rated by those who endure.
If I can find meaning/
To the chaos I participated in,
It can only be that it contributed/
To the termination of the desecration
of the human soul.
Sadly. . .
No amount of optimism,
Can allow me to believe,
That will transpire during my life.
I see too much flag waving,
And read of too much misery,
To imagine the malignancy/
Of enmity will soon end.
Memorial day is a day of sadness for me.
Not so much for those I have lost,
Their pain is over.
I weep for those who still stuffer,
The pain of immoral wrongs.
Those whose scars are visible,
And those whose affliction,
Can be detected by the gaze of melancholy;
That can only be seen by fellow travelers,
Through the labyrinth of woe.
                                                            ~~The Contrarian~~
(written many years ago) and offered here with his permission. Peace this day to everyone.

MemorialDay


Bookmark and Share

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Short Takes on the Day 11/11/08

11 Tuesday Nov 2008

Posted by Sherry in Election 2008, Gay Rights, Presidency, terrorism, Uncategorized, Veterans, War/Military

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Election 2008, gay rights, Presidency, terrorism, Veterans, War

AlterNet‘s Penny Coleman, offers a sobering analysis of the state of our military and its response to our burgeoning suicide rates. This is one of those dirty little secrets we don’t talk much about. Yet our veterans are killing themselves in increasingly large numbers. When will we do something about it? More than 6,000 die every year.

It seems that Filipino veterans who fought for the US in WWII were promised full benefits as veterans of the US. That promise was revoked in 1946 by Congress. There are still Filipino veterans who are waiting. Read about this in American Street.

If you didn’t see Keith Olbermann last night, you missed one hell of a commentary on Proposition 8. I would deeply recommend that you drop by the link and download the video. It was superb in every way. Part of it is transcribed for those who want the short version. Thanks to Crooks & Liars for the link.

No doubt you have read of Barack and Michelle’s visit to the White House yesterday. You have never, (I promise you) got a description of it the way the indomitable DistributorCap DC can do it. Don’t miss the laugh fest.

This picture is all over the Internet. But the caption is directly from Hullabaloo. Stop by and read a great blog on all things political.

Obama meets with dangerous world leader without preconditions

Obama meets with dangerous world leader without preconditions

Just on a side note, please note that the person in charge of the cleaning and such is very very anal retentive. See how all the chair legs and table legs all line up in perfection. Whoa, seriously anal dude.

If you are interested in how Bill Ayres viewed all the swirling controversy about him, you can bop on over to In These Times and read his thoughts. The man was seriously threatened as you might assume by the usual flaky folks.
Bookmark and Share

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Who We Are

Thinking non-stop since April 15, 1950. We search for meaning amid the chaos.

Giggles

Laugh as Long as You Can

Subscribe

Subscribe in a reader

Donations Joyfully Accepted

Calendar

January 2023
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Nov    

Follow Me!

Follow afeatheradrift on Twitter

Facebook

Sherry Peyton
Sherry Peyton
Create Your Badge

Words of Wisdom

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die. ~~Sen. Edward M. Kennedy~~

Recent Posts

  • We moved to Blogger
  • Moving to Blogger
  • Christianist Doublespeak
  • Next Week I’m Gonna Start Biting People
  • Time to Report for Retirement
  • The Best Little Whorehouse in Boulder? Or How I Loved to Learn Republicanese Gangsta Style
  • The Power of the Post
  • The Exceptionalism of the United States of America
  • Can We Stop With the Illegals Shit?
  • I Laughed, I Cried, I Spat Epithets, I Chewed the Rug
  • *Temporarily Asphyxiated With Stupid
  • Are You Having Trouble Hearing? Or is That Gum in Your Ear?
  • Collecting Dust Bunnies Among the Stars
  • Millennial Falcon Returning From Hyperbole
  • Opening a Box of Spiders

A Second Blog

  • Extraordinary Words
  • What's on the Stove?

History Sources

  • Encyclopedia Romana

The Subjects of My Interest

Drop the I Word

We Support OWS

Archives

The Hobo Jesus

Jesushobo With much thanks to Tim
Site Meter

Integrity

Twitter Updates

  • @realDonaldTrump #YOUREFIRED 2 years ago
  • Tales From the Pandemic acrazyladyblog.wordpress.com/2020/05/09/tal… 2 years ago
  • @MarshaBlackburn Stop the racism trumpish cultist 2 years ago
  • @realDonaldTrump NEVER you asshat. We await your removal via straight jacket and handcuffs. 4 years ago
  • Melanie says women's claim of sexual assault not suff evidence,. Women's voices minimized. She's as sick as tRump.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 4 years ago

World Visitors

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Existential Ennui
    • Join 2,450 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Existential Ennui
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: