Senator Crapo took what he called “a great opportunity to share information on important issues facing … our country”. He wanted to remind me of the “huge debt of gratitude” we owe our military veterans and “Due to the sacrifices made by our service men and women, we have the great privilege of living in a free country.”
I don’t know when and where he moved, but the slightly less dishonored senator from Idaho can’t be living in the same country as the one I’m studying where the US Senate has presided over the destruction of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. The “free country” I grew up in certainly died before the US President was allowed to order our military forces to bomb, shoot, blow up, poison, torture and maim hundreds of thousands of people without a legal Declaration of War.
THAT free country had a Constitution as the highest law of the land. THAT free country was a republic as the writers of said constitution knew the difference between the best organized government and a democracy, long-proven as the worst form of government. THAT free country knew what “is” is and what the plain English words of The Bill of Rights meant. While most 12-year olds can read and understand it, US Senators seem to have reading and comprehension challenges, to put it politely.
I am so fed up with sleaze-balls wrapping themselves in US flags soaked with the blood of young troops. These “sacrifices” and “ultimate sacrifices” turn my stomach. A bunch of teens join our military forces to defend their country, shoot exciting weapons, get a steady job, learn a skill, be all they can be and a thousand other motivations. Then the US Senators allow a treasonous president to send our military on missions of destruction that happen to be extremely profitable for the president’s sponsors and planners.
These young folks now wander around heavily armed, intermittently deadly in someone else’s country and, unsurprisingly, are not universally welcomed. In fact some of the natives find ways to fight back against the most powerful war machine the planet has ever created. Unfortunately their fight cannot be taken to the perpetrators, but to the troops in their neighborhoods. When those troops die, they were not sacrificed, but murdered. Murdered for money. Murdered by the president who was aided by the senators and congressmen. Those servicemen did not go walking up to an alter and sacrifice themselves, they tried to survive a bad life choice and lost.
Some of them can’t live with the evil they have found themselves embroiled in. They kill themselves. Our patriotic senators wrap the frighteningly large number of those guys into their “ultimate sacrifice” speeches, too.
The ever-so-slightly less dishonorable senator from Idaho wants me to “remember the fallen” on Veteran’s Day and I will. But my memory will not be the romantic vision he was trying to paint, rather an anger and disgust with the anointed ones who were given the controls of a fine republic and drove it off the cliff in a drunken orgy of short sighted power seeking and self gratification.