Don't DRONE Me Bro!

Those who think carnage is new to war, or "collateral damage" to how our government wages war, don't know much about U.S. proclivity for air strikes on towns and cities.  So here's an abridged top-hits list:  The United States Army Air Force, Dresden, Germany firestorm, Truman's Hiroshima and Nagasaki, LBJ's Bay of Tonkin to My Lai Massacre, and more recently GW's oil-exploration bombing of Baghdad and Fallujah -- all cities with civilian populations, not legitimate military targets; all marketed to inhabitants of American cities with the same refrain, "National Security," "Protecting American Lives," "Saving Democracy."  So, if you buy it, you own it.

Self-evident truths:  war has advanced more technologically than education, gun control, or prison and immigration reform; Social Media denies Americans the WWII excuse, "we didn't know;" and Obama's Drones like Bush's Torture do more for Al Qaeda enlistments than American peace of mind. 

Still let's not be as myopic as a media droning on about Drones.  Targeting the details with Drone-like precision is paramount responsibility for the governed, more patriotic than 2001 "USA Patriot Act" and more supremely American than 2011 "Citizens United."

In a land of the free where an Equal Rights Amendment can't get enough public attention, to get enough states signed on, to get the 113^th Congress, to get Constitution amended, to get women full citizenship, we need to get our home of the brave in order with Drone-like focus on a military that looks the other way when its female enlisted are raped, bullied, and intimidated out of service for their country. 

In a land where Second Amendment overreach allows a man to stroll into a Virginia Kroger's crowded with shoppers, bearing a fully loaded assault weapon, the safety of our school children and our right to live free from fear is trumped.  Can't you hear Eisenhower whispering in your ear to droning drum beat; beware, it's corporate profits from clandestine combo with military technologies that threatens freedoms.

Too many get glazed and dazed, reacting only to where the media laser beam-dot points.  Like the simmering pot frog, we're boiled over by technology that swings both ways because both elected and electorate of, by, and for the corporate bottom line have neither kept pace with needed legislation nor the realities of a changed world bleeding from changed warfare -- the longer we allow gun violence on foreign battlefields or inner-city streets, the more we become what we seek to destroy.

Drones come in almost as many different shapes, sizes, and colors as people, and like atomic nuclear power, are marketed by inventors for peak sales to those using tax dollars to purchase and remotely target them.  Presidential power, in the correct hands and mindset, can be a godly tool for justice for all, but when Wall Street profit is priority, true patriots must look through Franklin bifocals to refocus "We the People," because, like Drones, not all Presidents are created equal. 

Personally knowing at least one armed bodyguard, one former Capital Policeman, and one government assassin, I insist, war is no longer hell, it's hell on earth.  

So instead of being herded down another blind alley by corporate-owned media flailing away over the latest body overweight, rather than body count, to hype the distraction d'jour, forget about 'to lip-sync or not to lip-sync' in winter.  Ponder instead this cold reality:  our Drone-targeted Taliban and Al Qaeda hate education equality so much they shot Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai, and an American First Lady had to attend the funeral of American teen, Hadiya Pendleton, killed in street-gang crossfire just days after she performed for a Presidential Inaugural, both in the 21^st century. 

If you don't like the world we live in, haunt the halls of Congress, for until we're defined by more than our weapons, this is the State of Our Union.