For reasons I myself don't quite understand, I want to take some time to talk about loss. In particular the loss of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Combat losses. Our young Americans in particular, but this applies to every loss, regardless of nationality,religion,race,creed, or any other such "division" we choose to apply.
I only know of three people who are very public about their own personal sense of this loss. Ms. Cindy Sheehan, of course many people around the world know of her loss. Professor Bracevich, and Missy Beattie.
Professor Bracevich has recently spoken of the loss of his son in Iraq in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Missy Beattie has written a number of articles regarding the loss of her nephew in Iraq. I have read her commentaries on "Counterpunch.org" web site. She continues to speak out against the war and the criminal acts that started it.
These three people are quite brave in sharing their loss with us. They have lost sons and/or close family members. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a hurt that never goes away.
My second wife Sherie and I lost our only child. Jennifer was born premature and only lived six weeks. She would have turned 24 this month of May. Sixteen years later, Sherie died from brain cancer.
The loss of a child is probably the worst loss a person can face in this life. We are somewhat equipped to deal with the loss of our grandparents, and then parents. Sure, they were older and had lived a long, full life. Or so we hope. A child, that is quite different. A child has never had a full life. When they die, there is all that potential that is just gone. We can never know how they would have turned out. What sort of person they would become. What sort of job/career would they have? Would they have a family? Would they find happiness? All those questions go unanswered for the rest of your life. You never forget them, no matter how short your time was with them. You always wonder.
I saw the interview Ms. Sheehan gave on "Democracy Now" on Link TV Wednesday. I am amazed at how strong she still is. Not only did she have to deal with the loss of her son, her marriage broke up and her health was quite bad for a time since she began her protest. The marriage thing may not be related to the protest, none of my business.
She knew going in she would get flak from the "right wing" nuts and politicians. When she spoke out about how the Democrats are not doing all they could/should to end the war, she caught hell from the "left wing" as well. Poor woman, she actually thought there were two parties in America. Some of us could have told her that we just have two sides of the same coin. The "war party" as Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com likes to call it.
One good thing to come from her interview is that she will be back. She must be in great need of rest. So many people made her into a symbol. That isn't fair. She is just a normal human being, and I think way too many people put way too much pressure on her. She also found that MoveOn.org is just an arm of the DLC. Not very useful. She should have, and did go more towards folks like "Veterans for Peace". There is a true anti war group. Old warriors who do not want our young warriors to die for a lie. Ms. Sheehan also said that after she is able to regroup and come back, it will not be with any political party. Good for her, as today there are no real alternatives. The Greens are not worth the effort. They basically "gave" their votes to Kerry in 2004. Some party. More like Democrats in disguise. Well, pin a tail on that donkey.
America DOES need a real opposition party. Dean Velvel was looking into that at one time. I think the effort has stalled out. Lack of support is my guess.
As Ms. Sheehan has said, America today cares more about who the next "American Idol" will be than the wars we are fighting still today. She is correct and it is a sad commentary on our country that she is correct. Hell, give me a beer and turn on the ball game.
General Smedley Butler was right. There are only two reasons for war. To defend OUR homes and the Bill of Rights. All other reasons for war are a racket. This from a man who spent 33 years in the Marine Corps and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor TWICE. A real patriotic man if ever there was one.
Who do we get? Well, our "decider" aka "commander guy" went AWOL from the Texas Air Guard. The UCMJ says that after 30 days continuous AWOL, the AWOL person is now a deserter. Nice job there Shrub. We also have old "dead-eye" Dick Cheney. He had "other priorities" during Viet Nam. So, he got himself 5 deferments. A class A coward and total chickenshit. Now the military lets this asshole Cheney give speeches on board an air craft carrier in the Gulf. They even let him into West Point to give a speech to the graduating cadets! Well, that is the Army. Glad I was a Marine.
There is hardly a member of this criminal administration who ever served in the US military, let alone ever faced combat. Shooting an old lawyer in the face with bird shot does NOT count Dick.
What we need are more people like Professor Bracevich, Cindy Sheehan, and Missy Beattie. We need leaders who will not be so goddamn free and easy with sending OUR young people off to war.
Hell, I turn 60 later this year. That makes every one younger than their mid 40's a kid to me. We are sending OUR kids off to die for a lie. We are allowing our criminal administration to do this. We are allowing this same gang of criminals to shred OUR Constitution. This criminal gang is violating OUR Bill of Rights. This gang of criminals are destroying habeas corpus! That right goes way back before America was even a colony!
We are fighting these wars with borrowed money. Japan and China hold more than one trillion!!!!! dollars in US government notes. If they decide to cash in, or trade dollars for Euros, our economy is in the toilet and it is being flushed down the drain. And don't forget the housing bubble. Things could get to where 1929 will look like a walk in the park. Wait, no, a better(?) analogy, a "cake walk" to use the language of this criminal gang. I can just see old Babs Bush, "let them eat cake".
Well, I sure am not much of a writer. I love music, most any kind of music. My favorite is classic rock. I had wanted to somehow work some musical bits into this. The Moody Blues. In many of their albums, just before the first song, there is some spoken word. From the album "To Our Children's Children's Children" I wanted to use the first few lines. They go like this; "Blasting,billowing,bursting forth with the power of ten billion butterfly sneezes. Man with his flaming fire has conquered the wayward breezes".
I just can't quite seem to make that fit this entry. Sorry about that folks.
To our children, and to our children's children's children, WE owe it to them to defend OUR Constitution, OUR Bill of Rights, and OUR country. We need to be rid of the current crop of political "leaders". Save for Dr. Ron Paul, he at least respects the Constitution.
semper fi
31 May 2007
Just curious........
I was just thinking about doing more on this blog. I got to wondering, it is something I do a lot of. Being permanently disabled, you have nothing but time to read,think,play games. Not very much money to do some things, like drive around, just for the sake of riding with diesel at $2.80 at the lowest price in Alexandria last time I was in town.
Anyhow, the old mind got to pondering some rather obscure things. My old mind does lots of obscure wondering. That is not due to any disability, it just comes naturally to me.
One thing I am a bit curious about, does the Shrub and his immediate family invest in hedge funds? One wonders about this at odd times.
Also, when the Shrub, aka little Bush, gets looking a bit scruffy, do they call in one of those $400.00 per hair cut stylists or do they just get one of the illegal Mexican gardeners to give him a trim?
I don't know about the rest of you, but this old man is curious about these sorts of things.
Well, off to ponder more improbabilities. I'll be adding to this again soon.
semper fi
Anyhow, the old mind got to pondering some rather obscure things. My old mind does lots of obscure wondering. That is not due to any disability, it just comes naturally to me.
One thing I am a bit curious about, does the Shrub and his immediate family invest in hedge funds? One wonders about this at odd times.
Also, when the Shrub, aka little Bush, gets looking a bit scruffy, do they call in one of those $400.00 per hair cut stylists or do they just get one of the illegal Mexican gardeners to give him a trim?
I don't know about the rest of you, but this old man is curious about these sorts of things.
Well, off to ponder more improbabilities. I'll be adding to this again soon.
semper fi
30 May 2007
Randon rants
Well, it has been some weeks since I last did anything on this blog. It isn't all that easy to come up with something worth being posted here. I suppose I could try a daily journal entry, but who would care? Hell, I wouldn't, and I write the crap on this blog.
No, trying to pick a topic for a blog is not as easy as it seemed once. You want to say something, but you want whatever you say to have some sort of meaning. Not just odd rants about the war or whatever happened on your trip to the gas station. To me, my blog entries ought to be worth more than just bullshit or rants against whatever has pissed me off on that particular day. So, for this old man, blog entries become less frequent. I would say that most days I either have little wroth saying, or just cannot quite figure how to say what I might want to say.
Not to worry, I will try to keep posting something here, just don't set your calendar by my posts, it may be quite some time between them. Remember folks, I was never a writer. I was a machinist and made things from metals, using a variety of machine tools. This business of writing is quite new to me.
I want to make some mention of Cindy Sheehan and her decision to quit the Democrats and all other activity, at least for a while.
First off, the donkey gang. I could have told her, before she became an activist that they would disappoint her. Contrary to popular belief, and the high school civics text books, we have but one party in America. Yes, it is the one old Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com calls the war party. Oh, it has two wings to it, donkey and elephant. Just two sides of the same coin. Some choice you get there folks. You can have the donkey or the elephant. Neither is house broken. They both tramp through the flowers and shit in your yard.
The donkey gang recently gave in to the Shrub on the war funding. The removed any and all mention of timetables or other such things. Why? Well, Shrub didn't want those things in his war funding. So, the donkey gang, being the "fine upstanding" folks they are, caved in. Yes sir, nice to see some spine there in DC. Well, you have to look real hard for it, and either "party" is not the place to look. Nope, our politicians have no spine. Hell, mine has had to go through three major surgeries and is never going to be as good as it was before, but I still have more than any of those spineless, gutless, piss-poor examples of humanity than our "great" political "leaders" have.
The donkey gang is as much for war as the elephants are. They just do it a bit differently. They tend to put a "humanitarian" face on their wars. The elephants just do war for fun and profit, without the "window dressing" of the donkey gang. Less talk, more bullets, you could say.
Cindy, they never were going to end the war. Nor can any of them tell you that your son did not die for a lie. I wish like hell that I could offer you more comfort than that. But, then, I wish for the wars to stop also. Old warriors do not always wish to see newer, younger warriors go off to new wars. Ask a vet and see.
As to Ms. Sheehan quitting her activism, all one can say is that she has earned a rest. The woman has been going full speed for a long time. Anybody ever hear of burn-out? Sure you have, and I can imagine she must be totally burned out by now. Then add to that, her trials of being called all sorts of nasty things by the war-mongers, and now even by the donkey gang. What, the donkey gang is against her? Yes, because she dared to be critical of them. Aha! So, she "bit the hand" and all that. No, she spoke the truth. She also found out that neither side of the war party coin have any use for truth tellers. They bit, and bit hard.
I really do understand her burn out. That is one reason this blog has so few entries on it. I get burned out and have trouble coming up with topics that I feel are worth the time to post here. And I do not do any way near the amount that Ms. Sheehan has done. Hell, she did more in a week than I could do in nearly a year. OK,so I can use the excuse that I am disabled and all. Still, one does get burned out after a while. Even more so when so many people oppose you, as she found out. Hers was a public protest and we all should be thankful for her efforts. She wanted answers, but did not get them. Now, she has decided to step back and regroup. I say, good for her. Take some time off, figure out where you want to go next, then do it. According to the interview she gave today on Democracy Now, that is just what she is going to do. She did mention that she will not be working with either political party. Good for her again. It is not worth the horse shit to try to work with either of those two gangs.
Funny thing, she is not too happy with MoveOn.org either. Hell, I never did trust that group either. I replied to at least one commentator some months ago that in my opinion, MoveOn had best mover over as they were just blocking the road. MoveOn seems to be tied closely to the DLC, and that can never be a good thing.
Well, I guess I have done enough for now. Got to get back to reading more on how old dead eye Dick Cheney is itching for more war, with Iran this time. Seems he and his pals the neo-cons and certain folks in Israel want to bomb Iran before Shrub is out of office. We shall see.......
semper fi
No, trying to pick a topic for a blog is not as easy as it seemed once. You want to say something, but you want whatever you say to have some sort of meaning. Not just odd rants about the war or whatever happened on your trip to the gas station. To me, my blog entries ought to be worth more than just bullshit or rants against whatever has pissed me off on that particular day. So, for this old man, blog entries become less frequent. I would say that most days I either have little wroth saying, or just cannot quite figure how to say what I might want to say.
Not to worry, I will try to keep posting something here, just don't set your calendar by my posts, it may be quite some time between them. Remember folks, I was never a writer. I was a machinist and made things from metals, using a variety of machine tools. This business of writing is quite new to me.
I want to make some mention of Cindy Sheehan and her decision to quit the Democrats and all other activity, at least for a while.
First off, the donkey gang. I could have told her, before she became an activist that they would disappoint her. Contrary to popular belief, and the high school civics text books, we have but one party in America. Yes, it is the one old Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com calls the war party. Oh, it has two wings to it, donkey and elephant. Just two sides of the same coin. Some choice you get there folks. You can have the donkey or the elephant. Neither is house broken. They both tramp through the flowers and shit in your yard.
The donkey gang recently gave in to the Shrub on the war funding. The removed any and all mention of timetables or other such things. Why? Well, Shrub didn't want those things in his war funding. So, the donkey gang, being the "fine upstanding" folks they are, caved in. Yes sir, nice to see some spine there in DC. Well, you have to look real hard for it, and either "party" is not the place to look. Nope, our politicians have no spine. Hell, mine has had to go through three major surgeries and is never going to be as good as it was before, but I still have more than any of those spineless, gutless, piss-poor examples of humanity than our "great" political "leaders" have.
The donkey gang is as much for war as the elephants are. They just do it a bit differently. They tend to put a "humanitarian" face on their wars. The elephants just do war for fun and profit, without the "window dressing" of the donkey gang. Less talk, more bullets, you could say.
Cindy, they never were going to end the war. Nor can any of them tell you that your son did not die for a lie. I wish like hell that I could offer you more comfort than that. But, then, I wish for the wars to stop also. Old warriors do not always wish to see newer, younger warriors go off to new wars. Ask a vet and see.
As to Ms. Sheehan quitting her activism, all one can say is that she has earned a rest. The woman has been going full speed for a long time. Anybody ever hear of burn-out? Sure you have, and I can imagine she must be totally burned out by now. Then add to that, her trials of being called all sorts of nasty things by the war-mongers, and now even by the donkey gang. What, the donkey gang is against her? Yes, because she dared to be critical of them. Aha! So, she "bit the hand" and all that. No, she spoke the truth. She also found out that neither side of the war party coin have any use for truth tellers. They bit, and bit hard.
I really do understand her burn out. That is one reason this blog has so few entries on it. I get burned out and have trouble coming up with topics that I feel are worth the time to post here. And I do not do any way near the amount that Ms. Sheehan has done. Hell, she did more in a week than I could do in nearly a year. OK,so I can use the excuse that I am disabled and all. Still, one does get burned out after a while. Even more so when so many people oppose you, as she found out. Hers was a public protest and we all should be thankful for her efforts. She wanted answers, but did not get them. Now, she has decided to step back and regroup. I say, good for her. Take some time off, figure out where you want to go next, then do it. According to the interview she gave today on Democracy Now, that is just what she is going to do. She did mention that she will not be working with either political party. Good for her again. It is not worth the horse shit to try to work with either of those two gangs.
Funny thing, she is not too happy with MoveOn.org either. Hell, I never did trust that group either. I replied to at least one commentator some months ago that in my opinion, MoveOn had best mover over as they were just blocking the road. MoveOn seems to be tied closely to the DLC, and that can never be a good thing.
Well, I guess I have done enough for now. Got to get back to reading more on how old dead eye Dick Cheney is itching for more war, with Iran this time. Seems he and his pals the neo-cons and certain folks in Israel want to bomb Iran before Shrub is out of office. We shall see.......
semper fi