Vortex

As you can tell by Kathy's article today (and you might want to read it before you read this) she's pissed off. I mean really angry about the entire Dick Cheney saga. Can't blame her. As she writes, she's been slogging through the muck of this filthy Bush Crime Family for eight years of active duty and now a seemingly endless time anticipated in the ready reserves. (Yeah, it's just like military service.)

But, see, Kathy's female. And that may explain the depth of her anger. She's the gender that squeezes out all the babies that grow up and then go die in war -- endless war -- war begun by swine like Dick Cheney. It matters not what the mothers may have had in mind for their children. Dreams? They die when the son (and now daughters, too) die. Or they crumble into dust when the child returns from a horrific time in combat with arms blown off, heads caved in, souls eaten away, minds completely blown. Dreams for the children nurtured and cared for all those years? Plans? Hopes for their future? Forget them. Or go mad trying.

Husbands? They were birthed, too, weren't they. Some other woman experienced that pain, some other woman held that baby, some other woman had dreams for her son. And the boy grew into a man, and perhaps married, and joined the military and fathered a child or two or three he left behind so he could fulfill his oath in a war begun by Dick Cheney, based on lies and greed and deceit and fraud. And the young wife he left behind sings to her babies and worries and waits.

Yeah, Kathy's pissed. I can't imagine there is a woman who has seen her child depart for a war based on such criminal deception who is not enraged. Oh, sure, there are the women who have been deceived not just by slime like Dick Cheney, but also by their churches, by their political leaders, by their education,  by what has been drilled endlessly into their consciousness by a culture that is mostly insane. A woman like this may simply give up. Take my son. Just take him. There's nothing I can do.

I understand Kathy's anger. It is righteous and powerful. It means that she would not -- under any circumstances -- allow her child to be sucked into the vortex of some madman's war lust, some poisonous, cowardly murderer like Dick Cheney -- who never took up arms himself, to expand by force the predatory capitalism he personifies. (He had better things to do in the sixties than join the military he once condescendingly declared.) But, Kathy? She would take her child and disappear before she would allow lies camouflaged as duty to devour the dreams she has for her child.

And, she is aware -- acutely aware because she is a woman -- of the unspeakable pain into which a mother is drowned, burned, flayed, because of the cowardly, destructive actions of a liar such as Dick Cheney. She knows, also, the suffering, equally unspeakable, of all the women whose children, sons, husbands, brothers, daughters, who have been killed by the murderous lies forced upon them by Dick Cheney, lies that arrived in the form of bombs and fire and thunder and pain and death, endless death.

Yeah, Kathy's pissed today. As she was yesterday. And last week. And as she will be until killers like Dick Cheney are brought to justice. And, that may be never.