For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain's majesty
Above the fruited plain!
America, America, God shed His grace on thee.
And crowned thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea. ~America the Beautiful, Katherine Lee Bates, first stanza.
A United States Army officer and his family have been moved to quarters on a military base for their own protection.
Not from the Enemy, not from terrorists, not from any hostile foreign force.
They're being protected from Trump Supporters.
The officer in question is, of course, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who I've written about previously. I've been saying for longer than I care to have been saying it, that this mess or something like it would end with the far-right, or the religious nuts or white supremacists or whatever taking up arms against the United States government and the military.
Do you believe me now?
A decorated United States Army officer, a Lieutenant Colonel with a long and distinguished record, a hard-core expert on the country to which he was assigned, is under threat from...let me get this straight...supposedly-conservative Republican Americans for...doing his job and taking his oath to the Constitution seriously...?
Imagine if you will, eating, sleeping, watching TV and trying to go about your business and live your life and have your family do the same...under the constant watchful eye of Security Forces. Imagine, quite possibly, having to have weapons close at hand not because you live in or are serving in a combat zone...but because a bunch of your own countrymen are threatening your life because you did what you are supposed to do, what your oath demands of you, what has been baked into the cake of your professional training since the Academy, or Basic Military Training, or Officers Candidate School. For the people who are worth a damn, those oaths aren't just words, they're a reflex, a constant brake on one's actions, a constant set of higher values.
Integrity Above All.
Service Before Self.
Excellence In All That We Do.
~United States Air Force core values .
One one level, my first response regarding these fucking people is basically "Better pack a lunch, assholes." The United States military oath specifies "All enemies foreign and domestic" for a fucking reason.
But on another level, it shouldn't have to come to that, Ever.
This is America, since the end of the Indian Wars in the 1890's at least, we tend to resolve domestic conflict with ballots rather than bullets, or through peaceful protest rather than violent action. Politics, as distasteful as it often seems...is most often far more preferable than the alternative.
In my own day, it was the breakup of Yugoslavia, then Somalia, Rwanda, interminable conflict in Bosnia, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and later conflicts in Kosovo and Macedonia and various African civil wars...not to mention Northern Watch and Southern Watch, making sure Saddam didn't get too out of control. If the 1990's...the era of militia nuts and Newt Gingrich, when all this toxic partisan bullshit got started...should have taught us anything it's that civil wars suck.
And I'd like to remind you that even peacetime military service is hard and dangerous and dirty and lonely even if your greatest adversaries are defense cuts or the weather, but it does have the benefit that there's nobody shooting at you.
And that's before the new century, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and watching my bros...both figurative and family member alike...have to deal with even worse. I have a friend who was permanently disabled when his vehicle hit an improvised explosive device in Iraq, and another who came back from Afghanistan with PTSD that was severe enough he eventually committed suicide. I have a cousin who's battled alcohol and drug addictions since he got out of the Marine Corps. Far beyond that, there's many more walking wounded whose scars both mental and physical are not immediately visible, who are still with us, beset with a crumbling veteran's health care system all too often maliciously neglected by Republicans whenever they're in power, and under-funded by them even when they aren't.
Republicans.
The same people now threatening the life of a US Army soldier, for doing his goddamned job.
The same people whose President, who they revere as a personal champion and damned near worship as a god, pardons actual war criminals who were turned in by their own teammates, or whose own enlisted platoon members testified against them at Courts Martial.
I'm here to tell you, Republicans don't "Support the Troops" even when the Troops are hard-core Republicans...unless there's something in it for them. And I hope I'm wrong, but along those lines I see something sinister in the whole idea of Trump pardoning convicted war criminals...like he thinks he's going to want a core group of loyalists with military training who owe him something...or something like that.
And there's an awful lot of these fucking people who have yet to come around to simple concepts like basic humanity, there's a lot more of those people who are Trump Supporters than who are not.
And these people have been threatening violence against those with whom they disagree for a while.
Now take what we know, what we all see on a fairly well daily basis, all the stories we've heard and all the pain that we know exists stemming from conflicts in places like Afghanistan...
...And transpose that to Alabama.
Instead of Iraq, imagine if you will an insurgency in Idaho. I guarantee you, there's people who live there who have imagined exactly that.
Do you think people in California or Michigan will be kindly disposed towards refugees, if those refugees are from Mississippi or Oklahoma, rather than Syria or Vietnam?
I've read about the Depression, and heard stories from my grandparents. I've heard about and studied the successive Great Migrations of African Americans. I'm here to tell you they won't be.
The destructive nature of what these people are doing is only going to keep piling up and get worse, until it is made to stop.
Do you think people like Tucker Carlson are going to be smirking any less when the MLRS rockets are striking some ridge line in Appalachia than he would be if they were hitting Taliban positions on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border?
Do you think the CNN or Fox News talking heads will opine more or less gravely about the "beauty" of American power when those Tomahawks launching from the Vertical Launch Systems on the USS Ramage are targeted to strike insurgent positions in East Texas than they did when it was some random airbase in Syria? Will the furor about Russia selling S-400 missiles to Turkey be greater or lesser than that of Russia selling them to Alabama?
No, and long story short, the corporations and the media and all type of other people will find ways to profit from the misery that's going to result from the conflicts we have coming if we as a people don't stand up and put a stop to this bullshit.
That's what the "Blue Wave" a year ago was about, and that's what Impeachment is all about today. In a war, one of the first casualties is usually the truth. That's what these Constitutional and political processes are about, is upholding the truth and the law so maybe we can stop this shit and leave the assholes railing at their demons in the darkness instead of taking them out on the rest of us.
I have a feeling that some degree of conflict is inevitable, but it's going to be worse if people don't stand up.
Remember that when some rando tries to tell you that both sides are the same, or nothing matters. That is a very Russian talking point.
And who would profit more from our downfall? Even if they only partially succeed?
It's time to put a stop to this crap, people, before it does get worse.
If we don't care enough about the values we proclaim to stand up and fight for them, to hold ourselves and others to them, why even bother?
Fundamentally, we have a choice, either we all get a say in how things go...however small that say is.
Or we accept small and shitty and ever more aggrieved autocrats and nobody gets anything but them.
Your call.
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