But, 'If the burden is too great, just put it down!' says the adage. So does the media intructed majority, giggling with fun and recreation. Why-me-worry, 'patriotic' flag waving civilians send the kids off to overseas wars. On TV they are brave and hansome looking in increasingly heavy gear dressed to kill with star-wars-like high tech hand held weapons often equipped electronically with phones to call-in coordinates for planes and drones strike in back up. This media obedient majority, believing in the wars, will ready to cheer them if they make it back.
Adjust!, says the military psychiatrist. Look at all the other combatants and
trainees. They are mostly well-adjusted to following orders, and trusting
their commanders and the commander-in-chief. How could life in the military be otherwise. Just take care of number one, stay tight with your buddies and protect them and yourself. Leave the thinking to your officers. Just follow orders.
You followed orders. It's over, you made it back. Forget it! And now, supress that searing human compassion for the families of our Afghani, Iraqi, and Pakistani brothers and sisters killed or maimed in these weeks of U.S. drone bombings and other weapons fire. Forget them just as before them, you tried to forget the dead and maimed Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Dominicans, Panamanians - no, no, no, to worry about them is called being a 'bleeding heart.' Big Brother media warns us that that is what the communists and the terrorists and America's 'enemies' want you to do. Break down, so they, the bad guys, can win.
Multiply these thoughts of your veteran-writer by hundreds of thousands, or
millions, if you add in ordinary civilians no longer comfortable about being an American now, or already uncomfortable before, during our war in Vietnam, or whenever horrific covert CIA life-taking activities are declassified (and you manage to read of them on the Internet's alternative independent media.)
A multitude of us applying for treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress syndrome might be an angle for Veterans For Peace and even non-Veteran peace activists to pursue as a public consciousness raising technique for exposing a bitter reality that is never discussed publicly?
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