You'll protest your Complicity

today i gave back.

i didn't really know what i was signing up for when i told my wife "sure." unload some boxes. move things. community service.

after breakfast, we went to the place where my wife and i, and some of her coworkers were to meet to do our volunteer community service.

the war veteran's museum.

from there, we went to the military reserve building, to unload food, clothing, sleeping bags, toiletries, and coats so that the 200 or so homeless veterans that operation stand down is expecting to show up tomorrow will be able to take them when they leave.

we were five of probably 100 to 150 volunteers. people from the community. active duty folks representing all branches of the armed forces. retired military. veterans, proudly wearing their pow/mia hats, their "vietnam vet" tshirts, limping as they walked from organizing tshirts to the table of socks.

i served. yeah, my service was mostly selfish. i needed a job. i needed money for college.

part of my job was to sit in a comfy office chair, behind a large desk, and tell elderly gentlemen who had been shot at, wounded possibly, serving their country that while i appreciated, beyond my ability to convey, what they had done for their country, and for me; that their country no longer gave a shit about them. not in so many words, of course. i liked my job. i wanted to hang onto it. but that is what it boiled down to, o my beloved non-existant readers. as a country, we no longer give a shit.

but i give a shit.

i love my country. of course, it is fucked up. i know. maybe all too well, actually. but i still love it. it is my country. it is my home. it isn't any better than anyone else's country, and i would proudly stand respectfully as another country's national anthem is played. but this is my country. it's my country because those men and women who will walk into the armory tomorrow and wait for a hand out went to foriegn soil. because they, and the people before them, believed in this country. believed in what it stands for.

and now they find themselves in need of new underwear. new socks. warm sleeping bags. a poncho to keep the rain off. someone who still gives a shit.

and, o beloved non-existants, my faithful few who still swing around, i am proud to say, with tears in my eyes:

i give a shit.

and:

thank you.

darth sardonic

the plight of humanity...

for lady macleod specifically, and the world in general. and because i feel this particular post deserves a certain amount of class to lend it weight, i will refrain from swearing.

i first became aware of the plight of the tibetans through rudehead. he not only had a "free tibet" sticker on his bumper, but his dashboard as well. and later, when i bought the beaster and proceeded to cover it in offensive and sarcastic stickers, a "free tibet" sticker was prominently displayed.

but to discuss tibet, i need to travel back in time to the moment when i first became aware of the world at large, and the not-so-pretty things that happen in it.

so we head back to junior high, when i lived in constant fear of world war iii, the bomb, and bullies who would tease me incessantly. what, i often asked myself, was the point?

it began then, with pre-perestroika russia, who, i was convinced, wanted to nuke us into oblivion and enslave whatever remained of the human race living in what was once the united states.

but as i got older, i became aware of a much larger, more sinister, and, even worse, very real underlying current among us homo sapiens on this, the third rock from the sun: we feel an almost urgent need to overtake, enslave, and conquer. and the overtaken, enslaved, and conquered feel a primal need to fight back with whatever weapons they can find.

the irish were bombing the english. the people of the persian gulf were throwing rocks (i remember being awash in the sheer futility of these poor people as they threw broken bricks at advancing tanks, almost as if a fly had picked up a grain of sand and tossed it at me to prevent the descent of the swatter). africans were starving while the overlords let the food donated by other countries spoil on the docks.

i learned about ghandi. i learned about nelson mandela. i learned the underlying details of the vietnam war. i learned about colonization, mistreatment, raping and pillaging. i learned about gengis khan. i learned about alexander the great. i learned about hitler. i did a report on hiroshima. i learned about annihilation, holocaust, and genocide.

and it didn't stop, o fair and wonderful beloved non-existant readers. russia embraced peace talks with the us, and let go of communism, and still small countries were being taken over by bigger ones. the wall came down in berlin, and still people were being slaughtered the world over.

and the other big countries, the "heroic" countries that should swoop in like a big brother into the fray to pull out the underdog, to quell the bully, more often than not, stepped aside, gave the cold shoulder, turned a blind eye.

when does it end, o my beloveds, my droogs and only friends? who knows, i sure don't. but in the early days of man, i imagine the fighting was at a much smaller scale, over food, shelter, and mates. did the early man wake up one morning with the desire to take over every tribe he could reach in a day's ride? did he enlist like-minded friends, convincing them with paintings of grandeur and avarice?

and the list of countries that have, at one time or another, behaved to a smaller, undeveloped country (or worse, the "lessers" in their own country) in much the same manner as china does to tibet are endless: england, spain, portugal, korea, egypt, italy, russia, south africa, turkey, germany, greece, mongolia, and i dare not forget the u.s. of a., who enslaved africans for many decades, pushed the native people from their land and traditions and forced them at gunpoint into places wherein no man should dwell, followed by shoving our way of living down any throat unlucky enough to have opened to shout its desire to live as it wishes unharmed, unhindered, and free.

we, as a race, worldwide, have become arrogant. we have grown too big for our britches. we have burned our land, tainted our waters, and killed our brother with extreme prejudice, all the while smiling maniacally and declaring it is our "god-given" right.

and so, my beloved non-existant readers, the stalwart and strong, the faithful and kind, i am barely joking when i say that i believe we are due a plague, a cleansing, or even the third world war i dreaded so much, because we need to be knocked down. we need to be thinned. we need to be bombed back to the stone age, when our only desire was to remain warm, eat, and reproduce. our respective gods to whom we pray and by whom we curse are residing in their heavens, alternately shouting with anger and weeping with anguish for the atrocities we heap on one another in their names, or in our own.

and with that, i will leave you for today. i am in desperate need of some quiet time to release the emotions that burn inside my eye sockets (i really don't feel like trying to explain to my mom that i am bawling for the plight of humanity), and to remind myself that, despite all this, i still believe there is hope, and that i am the jaded, cynical optimist.

darth sardonic

p.s. a note to let anyone who should happenchance upon this post, i am not amassing the makings of large car bombs. i am not mailing manifestoes to newspapers. i am not building a bomb shelter and saving cans of food. i do not think of myself as a "weapon" to execute god's wrath. i am merely a mortal who tries to raise his family to be open-minded, but not blind; and who occasionally looks at the bigger picture around him and shakes his head in shame with tears in his eyes.

and we never forgot...

i need to get something off my chest:

i am watching the majestic (brilliant fucking movie, if you haven't seen it, run out and rent it now. right fucking now. it's jim carey's first completely serious role, and fuck me gently with a chainsaw sideways if he doesn't pull it off in spades. i would liken him to jimmy stewart in this movie. but i digress), and this movie, of course, makes me cry. and shit, who knows? i guess i need it. but while i watch it, i keep thinking about wwii and our current little shindig, and i can't help but wonder what the big difference is.

then it hit me: we are not invested in our current wars (yes, wars. the us is currently fighting in two countries still. we only hear about iraq, but our sons and daughters are still dying in afghanistan as well). oh, i mean, i am invested, i am so fucking invested that sometimes it feels as if someone has pulled my very entrails out of my stomach and gone sifting through them looking for gold. and there are many like me, and i end up talking to them in chats, and here and there around base and post, and i see my own ache and longing and melancholy staring right back at me as if mirrored in their eyes.

but we, the country, we are not invested in the outcome overseas. no one is asking us to cut back on sugar. no one is telling us we have to make our tires last longer cause our boys need the rubber to win the war. no one is asking us to do our part to aid the war effort. no one is telling us to grow a victory garden. no one is asking us to buy war bonds. shit, our very president urged us to go out after 9/11 and go shopping, for fuck's sake! and if companies haven't latched onto this as an opportunity to make a fast buck, then i am one blind and stupid motherfucker that should be clubbed like a baby seal, cause i see so many "support the troops" magnets and bumperstickers, and flags, etc etc etc.

we used to be proud to say our sons were serving. we gave each returning soldier a hero's welcome. then we got jaded, somewhere around the vietnam era. i try to tell every vietnam vet i see thanks. they didn't get the welcome home that the boys from wwii got. but they were doing the same thing, serving their country.

as the troops are doing now.

i remember watching george bush senior on a tv in argentina, overdubbed in castellano, and wondering if some of my friends were on their way to the desert then. i even joined the air force after i came home from south america, and still managed to miss any real action (i hadn't been doing my job long enough to have been included with the small handful of dentists and assistants who went to bosnia to do dental work on the un troops there), i felt like the midnight oil song, forgotten years. i hadn't been asked to sacrifice. none of my friends had died on the field of battle.

that never stopped me from appreciating the ones who have gone on before, regardless of what war, police action, conflict, or offensive they might've been called to.

and now, i am sacrificing, o my droogs and beloved non-existant readers, though for only a couple more days (well, till the next round, where i will do it all again), and i want to send out a reminder to those who maybe don't really think about what's going on "over there": our sons and daughters are still dying. this thing isn't over. it might very well be a long time before we can actually call it "over", before our sons and daughters are no longer dying on desert sands far from home.

and if we might take a moment, maybe just a couple seconds each day, when we turn off our tv's, and our computers, and our ipods, and our video games, and we launch a momentary prayer heavenward that our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives might all return home safe, and sound. that a peaceful end might be found to this conflict.

but most importantly, o my beloveds everywhere, that we vow that we will not forget.

we will not forget.

darth sardonic