- Take a break from hearing them tell us how many insurgents or suspected insurgents we killed dead today; how many we nailed yesterday; how many bagged for the whole week; how many we sent to their graves last month; totals for the several years before that show we have a high winning score against the bad guys in this or that third world country we occupy militarily.
- Give a rest to this counting dead Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan; counting dead Iraqis that won't trouble us again in Iraq; reporting how many Somalis were killed fighting our war lords and our paid Ethiopian invaders ordered in to prevent an Islamic Courts government in Somalia.
Today was the 4th of July holiday , but there is the TV, giving the body count of 47 for the day during a Marine invasion of some valley in Afghanistan, and interviewing a very satisfied sounding American general.
We don't smell ourselves so good with all the publicly as torturers while we sit and watch all the frenzied commercials desperately yelling at us in pseudo excitement and pretended joy to hurry and take advantage of some great price or deal with overly cute smiling feminine enticements or macho man exhortations to buy some fun.
We managed to continue to have fun while Iraqis were killed by the tens of thousands.
When middle-aged, we partied during crucifixion of the Vietnamese with napalm and the high altitude carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, hardly blinking during the invasion of the Dominican Republic.
As young men we were too busy training and admiring women to bother listening to the reports of how many of the communists that infested Korea were eliminated each and every day until it came to millions.
Earlier, in grade school we heard on the radio the statistics of dead on both sides during our good war against fascism. Six million Jews were exterminated along with even more millions of communist Russians by the Nazis while a lot of powerful and wealthy Americans just watched. They had made fortunes investing in building up the dirt poor Germany of the '20s as we played with our toys as tots in a climate of anti-Semitism. The Nazi Youth leader in the dock at Nuremberg testified that he learned anti-Semitism reading books by Henry Ford.
Now we are super elderly and watching the fireworks of the Fourth of July again, but, we are too sick and tired of the killing and counting, even on the holiday of American independence. Seems like other people's independence is only at our corporate governance's convenience.
On top of these squeezy feelings, there is doubt about the honesty of America's leaders, tightly connected to Wall Street's interests much more that concern for the future of the majority of Americans and the hungry billion people in the world.
But it's those damned body counts, more than anything else that prevents us from enjoying the fireworks that brings to mind the pyrotechnical beauty of the night of our bombing of the city of Baghdad for the second time in our grandchildren's lifetime. (An excellent body count ratio was announced during both wars on Iraq.)
The pop, bang and swish of the fireworks reminds one of the sound of mortars. Wish they would stop reminding us of precisely how many people Americans are making dead. Just on the Fourth of July, at least - maybe on other holidays as well - jus' for us ol' folks, who keep thinking of all those dead people's families. They might not forgive America, and might begrudge us our celebrating and never thinking of their suffering as we hear those nice and high body counts of our perceived local enemies.
We elderly are not going to have time to fix or sort things out. Like as not, as we leave, they will probably still be counting in that same old kill for peace game. We are just darn tired - sick an tired of body counts - gets to the point where we would rather have our own bodies counted in place of these younger foreigners who will not otherwise not have an old age - some, not even a childhood.
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