Birds of a Feather
Like I sometimes need to do in order to jump start my aging brain in the early AM, I went to my local hole in the wall (hole in the wall eatery’s are the best food) restaurant for breakfast. As is usually the case the morning newspapers were on the counter ready for any interested reader.
Front page of New Jersey’s The Star Ledger (Somerset/Hunterdon County edition) had the headline, “More troops dying for a nation not their own”. The article is the sad account of how over one hundred service members have received American citizenship as a function of being a KIA in the middle east. A gut wrenching story revealing how usurious and desperate America is for soldiers, and how desperate and used those people seeking to become Americans via military commitment truly are.
Actually, by the numbers provided in the paper there have been fewer non citizen troops killed than I would have anticipated. Of the four thousand KIA, one in four hundred are of the non US citizen category. Surprised or not, it was a depressing read that had my stomach in a knot when my french (I do not capitalize french or france, they are unworthy of uppercase status.) toast arrived. But then…
…I also had to face the reality that the article simply reinforces what I have known for decades…the why we wage wars, and why we use people and cast them aside like litter.
Truth to follow...spoiled American baby boomers and subsequent generatrions read at your own risk.
For at least half of America, the other half is considered refuse. I justify that statement because the article about non citizen soldiers finished on page 8, and on page nine was a bold ad for DIVORCE $299! In America, we like things to be easy. Not willing to compromise to and for your spouse? No problemo…$299 shall set your selfish ass free. You see, Americans are creatures of convenience. If it ain’t easy, especially for the spoiled rotten baby boomer generation…we simply find a way to make it go away.
We like to posture ourselves as being “modern”, “educated”, “superior”, “progressive”…I mean after all, we have hammers and wheelbarrows, cell phones and the internet. Hell, we’ve even been to the moon. (Yes, for all of your conspiracy types, mankind actually has stepped foot on the moon.) We like to think of ourselves as being more than what our behavior proves different. Divorce, the need for the dissolution of a marriage lives in that same area of our flawed human character which facilitates shooting wars. Hell, some marriage’s are dissolve literally as a shooting war, too many actually.
Is it any wonder why mankind is perpetually at war? We in the “civilized” i.e., commercialized cultures, live in bubbles. We get to peacefully go to breakfast at little hole in the wall restaurants and read articles that tell us about how the rest of the world is falling about at the seams…well, I think you know how this ends.
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