The Circle Of Life
It should not be any great revelation or prophesy that war is a viscous cycle, one that seems to tame the world. Leaders are lion tamers, keeping at bay, commanding them to sit on stools, foolishly, curiously, impetuously waking them. War is a formula as old as time, as timeless as humanity’s ability to reason; to want, need, to aggress and hurt each other. The pattern is infinite: people bomb you>you get angry>you reciprocally bomb others>they get exponentially angrier, and the cycle may rinse and repeat. Franz Kafka claimed that the meaning of life is that it stops, that anything of real and lasting value comes from within. It is therefore a gift. The first real indication of understanding that gift is admitting a wish to die. That tonic, that lethal elixir of life, cycles and services such an agenda.
Governments, some forms more thoroughly, have an insidious way of cultivating its more needful or gullible citizens to follow their decisions to ruthlessly bomb other countries with little consideration for the proportion of the inevitable reprisal. I realize, and humbly sympathize, that many men and women join the military and swear an oath almost identical to that of the president of these United States. They are in, complicit and contracted to fight wars regardless of their personal assessment of the situation. Since the war in Vietnam, people have willingly put their lives on the line to defend this country. This is an ideal which cloaks the glory, romance, the sensationalism. They are honoring the contractual obligation they made with the government. No one has literally given their life for America since the Civil War, likely WWII. Vietnam, Iraq, and the recent nudge of Iran to war were offensive moves or proxy wars. America was never at risk and, in fact, had the most to lose.
PROFESSIONAL WORRIERS
The John Boltons, Donald Rumsfelds, Dick Cheneys of the world have a mild death wish. For them, it is Kafkaesque. The trouble is, they secure themselves in a position to let others, of perhaps unlike minds, do their bidding. They project their wish, their boxed solution to life’s apparent puzzlement (to them), on others. Extreme examples of this are Stalin, Hussein, Miloseovic, Mussolini, and of course, Hitler. All of the members of the Nazi party are quite evident examples of the projected wish for death. Do you ever notice that the more people these thugs kill, the more indifferent they are to their own life Why do the majority of these mass shooters off themselves in the end? Because they know they are going to prison for a long time and want to spare taxpayers the expense of years of incarceration? I doubt it. It is the last minute decision, because they were not brave enough to just commit suicide in the first place.
War, the military, serving your country, is an eternal proposition. It was not until a way out of Vietnam was finally meted that potential enlistees began to use caution, to not trust the government simply because it was patriotic to do so. Jungles became desert and mountainous climes. Ten years became eighteen and counting. Iraq and the false claim of their possession of WMDs led the way to Soleimani’s mass slaughter of US troops with IEDs. Iraq led to Iran with its dwarfing properties. Is there an adult in the situation room? Or might it be ore on the nose to ask whether there was an adult in the room when a situation was created? Either way 3,200 paratroopers are being deployed to the middle — east for what for many is the first (quite possibly the last) mission of their stint in the military, their virtually blind and clueless (certainly with this commander in chief) foray into the military. They are diligent, honorable, yet inexorably mute blind mice. Marching onto a cargo plane a soldier is heard to cheer “we’re going to war, bro’.” They are psyched, full of adrenaline, but likely have no idea of the gravity of their situation how it mirrors wars before their time which became a shameful time for many veterans. It is truly heart-breaking to see a young recruit exuberantly going off to fight a war for a commander who has no interest in ever learning why such a war is foolish, who has no regard for those he put in harm’s way, intentionally, for his own political gain, for a gain that is not even likely to be made. If that wide-eyed soldier is wounded, or even killed, it is a good bet that this commander in chief won’t grieve with his family, much less attend a funeral.
Blind soldiers. It is ironic. I use this metaphor to illustrate how uninformed this military is with tweets and bogus retracted letters being written, Trump changing his mind every day, his intentions his rationales, his bush-league stratigery. On November 4, 1979, 52 hostages, including marines, were taken at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. This was the beginning of a 444-day captivity marked by the uncertain doses of intimidation, privation, and blatant torture. I’m surprised that a moratorium has not been imposed upon the recruiting of military until a commander in chief who has an ounce of logic, knowledge of a country’s history, and a willingness to take advisement from competent military strategists. The man does not know what he is doing, his motives ultimately serve him, and to top it off, he is the nimble footed inventor of the oldest dodge in the book — bone spurs.
Six days into a new decade, and hindsight is far from 20/20. We sit on the cusp of World War III, assured of random retaliation at Iran’s convenience. Our commander in chief graciously put the ball in their court, relinquishing any strategical advantages we had, all to a nation twice the size of Iraq. Even more disturbing to me is how they mourn Soleimani, a general, but still a terrorist who had a blood-lust for Americans. This killing machine meant that much to people? I find that, quite frankly, sad also. These people have been fitted lock stock and barrel for the Kafkaesque death mask. Evidently that is the grim reality they walk every day. Somehow most of us on planet America glorify war, but for the ost part we don’t espouse it as something to which every young boy or girl should aspire. We collectively mourn those who had the best shot of bringing harmony, peace, tranquility to this Franz Kafkaed abode.
