I see all my friends sigh in relief.

I see gushing in love, and in relief.

I remind my friends, my brothers and my sisters, that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.


We let that vigilance slip, and we have suffered the four years' price.

Hey

Let us not do that again?

Formulating the next installment.
Meanwhile:

https://youtu.be/8Dl62CcyuNI

Thinking about these times (a Preface)

So, it's Memorial Day.

I've been thinking a great deal the past week or so about President Obama's remarks at Hiroshima.

I don't hate him. I agree that he has been, in many ways, among the best of Presidents in my lifetime.
But that speech marks him, in my eyes, as a gigantic hypocrite.

Or maybe the wives and children of our necessary defensive and economic allies in Japan are simply worth more than those of a poor nomadic family at al-Majalah in Yemen (For those who have not seen the movie, or read the book, the reference is to a particularly damnable incident detailed in Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars).

The government represented by Obama and his first Secretary of State is a government ruled by fear and driven by the Military-Industrial complex. Its main interest is in Return on Investment for its Officers and Shareholders; its method is Constant, Global War, and it has yoked this country and its policy to serve those ends.

Despite his fine language:

 "Men, women, children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death....
"And yet that is not enough. For we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mind-set about war itself. To prevent conflict through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun. To see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race." 

despite these fine sentiments, President Obama has not only approved trillions of dollars for the refurbishment of our nuclear arsenal; worse still, he has hugely expanded the dark, covert, extra-judicial policies governing: undeclared drone warfare, unknowable "kill lists" and the use of extraordinary rendition, hired mercenaries, and made"alliances" with warlords and the like.
All to do the dirty work of this ill-defined and undefinable, eternal and unwinnable, "War on Terror."

When I am not bitter or ashamed, I am deeply, deeply angry.

This Memorial Day weekend, I am, of course, thinking back on family members of previous generations, many of whom served in a number of the conflicts this young land has seen.

When I think over what those folk had told me of why, and for what, they fought; and remember what they continued to fight for once their military service was done; I know immediately the sources of my bitterness, my shame, and my anger at where I and my generation have allowed the country they so valued to be led.

My paternal grandfather, a farm boy from Missouri born at the end of not the last century, but the century before, fought in that nightmare, The Great War, The War to End All Wars, World War One. He was in the same Division as Harry Truman.
That war marked him; he never spoke of it. His experience in banking and corruption in politics during the false Boom coming out out the War taught him other lessons.He gave his second son some words of experience, as the son was embarking on his successful law career: "No man ever made more than one hundred thousand dollars in his lifetime, honestly."

I know whence derives my bitterness, my anger.

I know what Clarence A. Bradshaw would think of the War Machine; of JSOC, and Blackwater, and Halliburton.

I'm sure he'd be right.
I know whence derives my bitterness, my anger.
I know what Clarence A. Bradshaw would think of the War Machine; of JSOC, and Blackwater, and Halliburton.
I'm sure he'd be right.