Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. ~Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address.
...
It's Memorial Day.
I'll point out again that "I'm so tired of this crap." Not that it seems to matter to about a third of the country, including much of the media and nearly all of the Republican Party.
Here's the thing; Aside from the rubes cheering for his stupid ass and basically every fart that comes out of it...nobody actually cares about this motherfucker.
Everybody else doing this shit who actually knows anything is either trying to get money or power (or both) from this situation...and none of them much care if the rest of the country goes to hell in the meantime.
These fucking people [The media and the "Conservative" political class] don't give a good goddamn if Trump turns America into the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia...but with a mall.
So long as the dead and the suffering and those fighting against this shit are kept out of their sight, that is. (The Basic MAGA's on the other hand will want all the suffering basically livestreamed for their entertainment.)
And of course, they all care that they can keep partying it up. (But it's better if somebody else can't.)
Where does it stop??
When is enough, going to be enough??
If it doesn't stop, if we don't stop it, this garbage is going to break America.
There will be two countries (at least) where this one used to be...and trust me, you won't want to live in the one that's basically Trump North Korea.
But the media will never shut up about it, for one thing.
I'll never get it, yo. And guess what? I don't want to, either.
The Libertarians booed the motherfucker, for fuck's sake!
Memorial Day is supposed to be about America's war dead, about those who didn't come back, and those who have gone before.
Today...as I do every Memorial Day, I remember my Air Force bro (by then an Air National Guardsman) who got called up and deployed to Afghanistan a month or so after he got married in 2003. He came back, late summer of 2004 only to find that something in his mind or his soul never left there, then he shipped out to Iraq for another year and a half. He got out when his time was up, couldn't keep it going. I didn't blame him. His wife left him in 2006. He never said what it was over, and I didn't want to pry. It was obvious that it hurt and by then his mental health wasn't great. My friend moved to Florida in 2007, got a job as some kind of contractor at NAS Jacksonville and we sort of lost touch.
He committed suicide in April of 2011, around what (had things worked out) would've been his eighth wedding anniversary. Rose, my ex-girlfriend that he had introduced me to, messaged me on Yahoo Messenger. She told me to call her. I did, and that's how I found out.
Then, as now, I feel like "What the fuck are we even doing here?"
Half my news feed on Threads was all about Donald Trump on this day.
The Republican Party has degenerated into an Idiocracy.
And I'm tired of it.
I can't help but feel like we're coming up on the next conflict, and whether it'll be with the Russians, or each other, or both...I don't know.
But I imagine the AI wannabe-overlords and the Tech Bros and other motherfuckers will just try and make even more money off of it, like trying to sell shit to troops in the battlespace in the same kind of way that Google stalked me (to the point of asking for reviews of my workplace) until I basically blew up and sent somebody a nasty E-mail saying "I work there, you don't want to know what I think."
How many young people, fighting to try and save this country, will give the Last Full Measure of Devotion simply because they forgot to mute their damn cell phones in the heat of the moment and got some stupid notification at the wrong time?
On the other side, how many people will die because the MAGA revolt didn't train their people worth a damn, made vaccinations optional for their forces and didn't supply them properly, Russian style?
This doesn't just apply to wars...we did it with COVID-19, too. We tried to do it with Trump's first term, but he won't stop. Sooner or later we're going to have to face something, hell, anything.
We have to stop feeding this bullshit, stop blowing the narcissist, America.
Maybe it's just me, but if you can't find a moral compass and rediscover right and wrong, at least have enough self-preservation to remember that one has to be alive to spend money.
Like I keep saying, there's a hard edge to reality. It's not Gravity that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom. You can argue with that all you like...but Physics won't care.
And neither will the Ghosts.
Sooner or later, you're going to have to be a better citizen. Sooner or later, you're going to have to stand up for America and Civilization...or at least for your own life and right to exist. I think you'll find that these things are pretty heavily connected.
But less blood will be shed if you start doing it now.
Remember that, this Memorial Day.
Before we have even more dead to commemorate.
~From the film Transformers.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco
No comments:
Post a Comment