War

War never really ends, does it?

We imagine, hope that when the shooting, the bombing, the dying ends that the war has ended with it.

No.

War is not so much a physical activity, but a conceptual task that represents so many different things to so many whether you have participated or not. All of it dependent on why and who has participated.

He remembers why he went; patriotism, to serve his country, a devotion he could not explain but felt in his heart, butterflies churning in his stomach, not of fear but of anxiety that he should be part of something.

Another, drawn in by non-participant warmongers and patriots, was convinced that, though you may hate it, it was his duty, patriotic or otherwise.

Yet another had been running away and hoping the commercials were right, though it may mean going to war, that in the end when he returns home, everything would be right because he would have something proud to stand on.

A Child Screaming In the Halls

Nevertheless, the fighting continued within them, the bombs, the rockets, the gunfire, the flamethrower, screaming everywhere. A child’s screams echo in the hallways and he can’t imagine anything else but a child shell shocked from war. He runs up the stairs to the apartment door from where the child is screaming. Pressing his ear to the door, he listens, unsure of what to do. Why is the child screaming? This goes on for several nights. The child’s mother confronts him outside on the stoop where she berates him for stalking them. Her husband is serving now. She sees our hero as weak; a coward, for not handling himself better. A real man knows why he goes to war. War is as horrible as anyone can imagine but there is no reason for a man not to act like a man.

Paranoid of a Small Dog

All he could think of was shooting, someone, something, anything. He held the .45 in his right hand pointed down at the dog. The dog looked up at him, sniffing then licking the cold barrel, whimpering a query as to what it was that he held. The dog had missed him so much in his absence that whenever possible it followed him about the house, sat beside him waiting to be comforted; and he did. But the he couldn’t help but feel the dog was stalking him. Wherever he looked, the tiny dog was there, its face innocent in its need for comfort, and satisfaction; but wasn’t there always more? All sense of trust and empathy had been left behind on the battlefield. The war hasn’t really ended for him. He imagines that only his own death can end the war for him.

The war won’t ever end for me will it, perhaps when I have died.

Blogs

Blogs are written by those who feel they have something to say, compelled to let others know what that is. Readers of blogs are those who either have nothing to say and need guidance sought in what bloggers have to say or do have something to say but fear to speak out and simply agree with those who come closest to their own ideas.

Horoscope 628

I can only hope.
"the future seems unexpected more than ever and it makes you feel insecure. its about to change soon and good luck will find its way into your life"

 

Layered II

Layered

The Israel Lobby?, by Noam Chomsky

The Israel Lobby?, by Noam Chomsky

Sir! No Sir

Sir! No Sir

Thomas Jefferson's Warning To America

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

* Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802) and later published in The Debate Over The Recharter Of The Bank Bill (1809)

Did you know the Federal Reserve and all state central banks are privately owned by banks, governed by banks, for the sake of the banks. Yes, these so called US government created entities that issue money in violation of the Constitution, to do business with our tax money, to add to their bottom line. We live in an economic feudal system whereby we harvest cash from our hard labor that we turn over to the IRS, where like the count room in a casino, the money is tallied and given up to the control of the Federal Reserve.

Christian Jihad?

They Thought They Were Free

"What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

You don't want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' . . .But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. . . .You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined." :

From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

Thanks to Tom Feeley
Posted by: Scott Horton on May 24, 05 | 4:49 pm www.antiwar.com