Memorial Day 2010
The right-wingers are all in a froth because the Obama family was spending the holiday weekend in Chicago, instead of the president doing more honoring of America’s fallen warriors. First let’s note that the wing-nuts are always in a froth; they are a continuous fountain of mindless fury.
Second, if these people were truly concerned about paying due respect for our nation’s war dead, they’d raise the bar a notch and work to limit the number of our countrymen who die on the battlefield. They would make it their holy mission to bring our soldiers and sailors and pilots back from foreign countries where instead of prosecuting pointless, unwinnable conflicts they would be home defending America...and out of needless harm’s way.
As anyone who has been in war or who has been all too up-close-and-personal through journalism or ministering to those who have been on the front, and to the families of those who had not returned alive or intact...war is hell. Manmade hell. An insufferable insanity ordered by rich old men, over and over again for millennia.
The military industrial complex, or the military Keynesianism that has been our economy for the past 60 years, is the worst possible behavior of our species. It is evil incarnate. It is all about greed, power, hatred, and violence, and we can only pray that evolution will raise us to level of awareness at some point where we will be able to defang this monster before it kills us.
There seems to be some confusion – some conflict, if you will – between the idea of showing our profound respect and gratitude and the equally powerful tearful courage that calls on our better selves to rise up against the carnage of strangers killing strangers.
Ending war is the only fitting tribute.
©2009 SetonnoteS
