On Guarding Freedom

 

I see a lot about military people guarding our freedoms… and I get angry every single time I see it.

 

Really? Where on earth did you get that idea?

 

War is seldom about freedom and more often economics, imperialism and greed. Sure, young people join because they feel a need to serve, to guard freedom, but they fight for what the politicians send them to fight for.

 

Take, for example, the last and longest US wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. If I hear one more person babble about 9/11 and these debacles, I might scream. We invaded Iraq because Cheney and Rumsfeld convinced Bush that there were WMDs there and that somehow, this would give us revenge for a bunch of predominantly Saudi Arabian terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks. There were no WMDs and Iraq was not really part of 9/11.

 

We invaded Afghanistan to catch Osama Bin Laden, except he wasn’t there so we stayed and stayed and stayed – pouring money and lives into the stupidest, most ill-conceived war ever. 2300 years ago, Alexander the Great got his ass handed to him in Afghanistan. They told him he could claim victory, but his army had been beaten and he even lost his beloved Bucephalus there. Over the centuries, other groups have sought to invade and take over only to be defeated. The Russians fought there for 10 years, spent all the money they had, saw their own government fall as a result and left with their tails between their legs.

 

Why on earth did we go there? History told us it was a BAD idea.

 

So was our freedom being challenged during this?

 

Certainly not by Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

Please understand, we do not fight wars for freedom. Those days are long gone, if they ever existed at all. We fight for oil, for power, to please our allies, and seemingly, to make Republican presidents feel manly. (Reagan – Grenada, Bush I – Iraq, Bush II – Iraq, Afghanistan)

 

US Soldiers fight for many reasons, some less noble than others, but all deserve our respect and they deserve more than the empty thank you they get from their government. My problem with wars is not and has not ever been the soldiers. My problem is with the cost – in lives, in money, in pain and sorrow. And the lies – the lies the men who run wars tell us all about why we are there, what we are doing and what our goals are. Every reason we went to Iraq was a lie. Every single reason.

 

Please stop telling me how we fight for freedom. Do you know the last war fought on America soil? WWII had an attack at Pearl Harbor (It was not even a territory) and some spying by the Germans and Japanese. You have to go back to the Civil War for a war fought totally in our own borders and that one is still divisive and probably always will be.

 

We guard our freedoms by making sure that every person eligible to vote is allowed to vote in free elections and by insuring a peaceful transfer of power from one person to another as a result of those elections.

 

War will not save your freedom. Ever.

 

 

 

A Police State

This one will not be popular.  The last one I wrote was not popular either so get the hell over yourselves.  I have come to the conclusion that I really don’t care what anyone out there thinks anymore.   The popping up of Trump signs in the community tells me that not many around have an opinion worth giving a crap about anyway if they are stupid enough to vote for Trump. 

But that’s not what I set out to say.

When did the US become a police state?  When did everyone who says something is wrong become cannon fodder for the police to beat and kill?  I’m sick of it. 

Every time I turn on the television, I see police brutality.  No, it’s not the liberal media.  It’s been there all along, I suspect, and with the advent of cell phone cameras, the police do not get away with it as readily as they once did.   Actually, they do get away with it because jury after jury think that disobeying a police officer is a death penalty offence and let the murdering law enforcement officers go free. 
Since 9/11 and the advent of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, we have lived in a police state.

I have never been fond of authority.  If you know me well, you know this is true.  The two times we’ve had to call law enforcement here to our house has cemented that and made me believe that as a group, they are not very bright and for the most part, useless. We had 5 officers who couldn’t find one teenager and decided it was easier to try to pass it off as domestic violence.  I believe to this day that if the boy had killed one of us, the other would be serving a life sentence for it. Larry actually went out in the neighborhood and found out who did it and told the police. 

What I don’t know is the why but I have suspicions.  I know that there is still rampant racism in some police departments.  Locally in our state, there have been accusations of quotas and discrimination toward African American officers.  I’ve even seen in some cases in the deep south, police officers were members of white supremacist groups.  To me, those men are less than garbage. 

But what I see more than that is fear and bad judgment. There are many people in law enforcement who are simply not qualified to carry a gun.  If they’re so afraid that they shoot at anything that moves, they need to find another damn job.  If a person’s first instinct is to shoot, he/she needs another job.  Law enforcement officers are supposed to PROTECT and SERVE the public and the public safety, not shoot civilians because they CAN.

Yes, this country is full of unrest and much of it because of the recent economic stresses and the growing inequality between the wealthy and everyone else.  Our government is filled with men and women who vote along party lines instead of working toward the common good.  They pander to religious and corporate groups who pay them to pander.  It makes people angry.  It makes me angry. 

I agree with protestors though I have to say that I cannot condone their violence, however effective it may be in the end.  Something must change and I fear that the change will be bad and we will move closer to that ‘safe’ society that everyone seems to want.  And by safe, I mean a totalitarian police state like Joseph Stalin’s USSR or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea. 

A solution?  There’s the rub.  What to do?  Fire all the cops?  No.  The new ones wouldn’t be any different.  The problem goes deeper and goes back to the founding documents of this country, to the reinforcement and additions to those documents. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – The Declaration of Independence.

In 1863, Lincoln added to this to include ALL when he freed the slaves though women were still not actually protected until they got the vote in 1920.  It is the duty of America and its government to insure these freedoms for all, not just for the favored ones.  This freedom includes the opportunity to live better than those who came before us, something sadly lacking in our times.

So what can we do?  Vote.  Speak out.  Treat people as you would be treated.  All these changes start with us.  Pray if you want but God isn’t going to wave his hand and fix it.  WE have to do that and we can begin in the ballot box, in our neighborhoods, our towns and cities.  We have to reject those who promote hate and discrimination. 

Will any of this work?  Not until Americans overcome their ignorance and their hubris and realize we have to change to survive as a nation.

My 50 Shades Rant

The series of books came to my attention a couple of years ago when I found out that they were really Twilight fanfiction turned into a ‘real’ book and I have to tell you I use the term 'real' VERY loosely.  I decided to read the first one since so many people were tittering over it on FB. 

Holy shit!  What a mistake!  I was introduced to a drab, dull character named Anastasia but called Ana. She was as interesting as vacuuming.  Maybe less.  And dumb.  This girl made was made for the term dim bulb.

She gets to interview this rich guy with red hair and flannel slacks than hang on his hips in some mystical way.  We know this because she tells us over and over and over and over and over…

Somehow he makes her sign a contract to be his submissive even though she doesn’t know what sex actually is and certainly has no idea what a submissive is.  She hates it and likes it and blah blah blah…

By this time, I told Larry that this was the worst book I’d ever tried to read.  He actually had a wonderful idea – stop wasting my time and read something I liked to read.  I followed his advice and stopped.

So how can I talk about it? 

I read enough to know it was poorly written.    I also read enough to know that I did not care for the subject matter and also enough to know that this was not a good representation of what BDSM aficionados call the ‘lifestyle”.  That sort of thing doesn’t float my boat and I’ll be damned if I even can make sense of it but to each his own. 

It is quite obvious that this writer, and I call her that loosely, did no research on the lifestyle she was portraying.  Hell, she didn’t even bother to learn American idiom and geography to write this book.

And now they advertise the movie.  Have you seen the trailers?  The actors are totally unappealing.  Don Johnson’s daughter looks so ugly and plain that you wonder what anyone would find appealing and the guy who plays Grey is totally unremarkable.  I’ve even read several accounts that the movie was so dull and unsexy that they had to reshoot scenes to make it sexy because there was NO chemistry between the two.

I won’t be seeing the movie.  The books were so bad that I couldn’t force myself to finish them.  You do what you like.  I’m waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron.  Give me some James Spader any time instead of E.L. James.

Sorrow without End

I have no words.  I sat down here to try to make some sense out of the unimaginable, nine years later.  People tell you that it lessens with time.  They are lying.  The day of her funeral, my mother’s cousin, who had lost his daughter 17 years before, said a good day is one in which her loss is not the first thing you think of when you wake up.  I still think of her at least once every minute of every day. I’m not sure a day had passed in nine years that I’ve not cried.

 

I don’t cry for her.  She is all right, wherever her beautiful spirit is dwelling.  But Larry and I are lost. Completely. Utterly. And worst of all, hopelessly.  She was the heart and soul of our family, our futures, our hopes and dreams. She was the only one.  Without her, the days spread meaninglessly from one to another.  I bide my time here.

 

We were cleaning out some things today for some new furniture and I found this little poem she’d written sometime.  “In my dreams, I skip on clouds…”

 

Days like today, it is nearly more than I can bear.

 

 

On War and Peace

On War and Peace

Again

I saw an interesting discussion on Ukraine, Russia and China today.  I am a pacifist.  I do not believe in war.  Some of the greatest men of our time, indeed of any time, were opposed to war and violence.  They believed in changing the world by other means, which did not mean that they weren’t willing to die for their beliefs themselves. 

Jesus Christ… Tolstoy… Gandhi… King:  these were men of nonviolence. 

Over 160,000,000 people died as a result of war in the 20^th century.  This is over half the population of the United States today – dead from war.  There are all sorts of arguments for war but in the end, wars are about territory, money, and power.  Period.  I’m not sure any human life is worth any of those things.  I am sure 160 million is a high cost, too high a cost. 

I can dink around on the computer and come up with all sorts of horrible statistics and facts for both sides of the argument.  So can you.   

Those of you who grew up after the Vietnam War and have not been in war yourselves, have seen little of war.  My generation was treated to up close and personal press coverage of the Vietnam War.  We saw the bodies, the wounded, and much more every night on the evening news.  We heard the lies the politicians and generals told us.  We saw brave and good men treated like criminals when they came home.  We saw unarmed college students die, shot by our own soldiers and then we woke up. 

War is indeed a form of hell. Ask the men who’ve been there.  I have met few who’d recommend it.  Men still suffer from the stress of the Vietnam War and it was over forty years ago.  I can remember my Uncle Will, who, when I was a child in the 1960s, still suffered from ‘shell shock’ from his days in the trenches in WWI.  If war has this much impact on individuals, imagine what it does to a people, to a nation, to the world. 

In my 54 years on this planet, I have seen no good come of war.  I do not expect that to change anytime soon. 

Albert Einstein was often quoted as saying "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."  If that doesn’t disturb you and make you think, then there is no hope for you anyway.

To quote John Lennon, all we are saying is give peace a chance. 

Protecting our religious beliefs

I guess it’s time for another rant. 

Every day I see “Let’s put God back in school.” 

Let’s not. 

First of all, our freedom of religion guarantees that neither the federal or state government can tell us how to worship in our country.  This was the most important amendment to the Constitution of the United States.  It gave us freedom to speak and worship as we wish.  The basis for this goes all the way back to Maryland Colony in 1634. 

This amendment was not established to take God out of government but rather to keep the government out of our churches.  School is, whether we like it not, an extension of the government because in our country, we have government funded education that is free to all. 

If you can’t see the conflict already then I will spell it out.  How can you run a public school for all children but force a certain belief system on them?  Christians can’t agree with one another on much so why would I want someone else teaching my child about faith?  That job is and has always been the job of the parents, not the state or federal government and I don’t think I want to trust it to them now. 

Schools have been tasked with a job beyond what was originally intended.  They now are expected to teach morality and to baby sit as well educate.  Do we really also want them to teach our children what they are allowed to believe?  What if they teach my kids things I disagree with?

Let’s not put God in school.  Let’s teach our children about God in our homes and our churches instead.  And let others do the same with their own religion. 

Why I'll never help anyone else

We started keeping Lydian 2 months ago and while I love keeping her, I am actually able to keep her no more than 3 days a week.  It takes me the other 4 to do the things I need to do and rest. 

This did not please Shina so she started criticizing me and insulting me every time she came to pick Lydian up.  I didn’t make healthy enough food, I didn’t know anything about grammar, I stole Lydian’s socks (that I also bought her).  She came in at 7 and stayed around til we hinted that she needed to get Lydian home at about 9:30 or 10 so she could go to school the next day.  When they spent the night, I had to nag like both of them were 6 to get them up so they could get going and get Lydian off to school.  I was wrong to make her toaster pastries because they have sugar.  It was better for her to eat cookies and cinnamon buns at school.  If they stayed on a weekend, she’d sleep in til 12 or 1, no matter what Larry and I had planned for the day. 

This Friday she didn’t bother to tell me she was picking Lydian up in a fit of shittiness.  I went to the school and she wasn’t there. When I thanked her on FB for her consideration, this is what she said: “You're welcome. Fridays and weekends I'd said I would take her to my Aunts', because you said a few weeks ago you were more comfortable with watching her a few days at a time. Thank you for the passive aggression, though.”  I wanted to answer this:  “I could have just said, ‘Fuck you!’”

We have spent something like $16,000 on this girl since she called up in up in 2006. She was about to be evicted and none of her family could be bothered to go get her. We bought food and kitchen stuff to start housekeeping, 2 cars, 3 computers, a refrigerator, Sara’s furniture, clothes and toys and money.  We have driven over in the middle of the night to pick her up when her BF tried to beat her up for the 3^rd time.  Larry went with her to all the court crap and I kept Lydian.  We helped her get her driving license and took her to sign up for foodstamps and Medicaid before she could drive.

I have cried nearly every waking hour since yesterday.  Every where I turn is a reminder of Lydian.  I have no idea if I’ll ever see her again.  I don’t want Shina to do what I tell her but I will not be insulted and slammed in my own home by her or anyone else.