I am by no means a war monger or even for that matter condone such a horrible act of humanity. After experiencing war, combat, I certainly can say that our world would be a better place without it. Unfortunately, though we as civilized America's may believe this truth, our world has yet to believe it too. It's a sad fact that we can't all just get along, but a very real and true one. I'm an advocate for world peace, but a bigger one for protecting the freedoms we have to believe so.
Watching a video posted on a facebook page, downloaded from youtube and originally aired on Jon Stewart's the Daily Show, which has always seemed to be very liberal in it's slight and comedy aspects, I was amazed at the amount of ignorance in our own community. If there's one thing that I hold to be 100% true in life it is that nothing, absolutely nothing with the obvious exception of this, has a definite right or wrong answer. We can argue semantics all day long about whether or not that's the only thing, but it's an exaggerative to make my point. This video was a comical interview and possibly if not likely jaded with the sleight of hand that every television news story has to show the side of the story most entertaining. It was of the Marine Corps recruiting center in Berkeley, California, and the city and the people of the city fighting to get it removed from Berkeley. Although it was very comical, it held a lot of truth that is bitter to the taste about WE Americans.
I have seen both sides of the spectrum and neither is particularly charming and certainly not beautiful. I'm talking the red meat eating, confederate flag having, two front teeth southerner's and the non showering, eat only green, make own clothes and live out of a tree for a year liberal hippies of the northwest and neighboring areas. They both have one great thing in common, and that's ignorance. These interviews made me sick to my stomach to think that these people absolutely without question knew what was right and wrong. That they had no consideration even for the other side of the argument, no consideration for the other human beings. No perspective, and no compassion. The video is right here if you want to view it before you read further... Hippies
The fact of the matter is that life is balance. It's a balance between good and evil, wealth and poor, health and poor health. When you have that with the proverbial black and white, what you get is gray. What we lack perspective on we will always be certain about. The world is flat. What we do not know we will not question. The earth is the center of the universe. We are a fortunate people, we Americans. We don't have to worry about what to eat, where to sleep. These are questions that can be answered with the simple help of the government of good Samaritans, of churches, if not by how most of us answer them; ourselves. We don't have the same worries that other countries do. We are spoiled and have shed blood and tears to be so.
Just take into consideration this; 10 Billion dollars is spent per month in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That means that over the past nine years that we have been in conflict we've spent $1.1 Trillion. That's about three times the amount we spent in WWII, assuming that my math is correct. But we only spent $360 Billion during that 5 year war. Now in that time, the military numbers ranged from 1.6 million to 8 million personnel. The lowest number is three times larger than the active military today. The entire economy based around the 'war effort.' Milk, gasoline, wood, and other building materials would have been nearly impossible or extremely expensive for the every day American. Even in Vietnam, only $140 billion was spent. That conflict lasted only 7 years, and the size of the military reached 3.5 million. 13% of that was non-volunteer draftees. Even with that dramatic cut off from WWII in size and money spent, there was still a 'war effort,' a restriction of goods to the civilians of the United States. The war was felt, it hit at home even if it was in southwest Asia. Today's military, cutting down on size again, is under 600 thousand in number. Less than a percent of the living population is serving or has served the military. With that small amount of sacrifice and small amount of hit at home, except to those few who have loved ones deployed or the Gold Star families, America has had all the luxury, all the freedoms that they always get.
The point I'm trying to get at is that who cares that there's a recruiting station in your town. Who cares that they are going on school campus and recruiting what will be less than 1% of the population in order to protect the very freedoms that give the right to picket and protest such things! Focus your attention on something more pressing, more rewarding for society. Use the precious and valuable freedoms that we have to do good for America. The semantic part is biting me in the ass here, but the World around us, those who hate us out of their ignorance, out of their envy of what we all have in this country, they are not going to change anytime soon. Of course we can't understand what they would want to hurt us, attack us, kill us, because we have no perspective in what it's like to have to worry day in and day out of how to survive. They have the playground kids mentality that Suzy has what we want, and if we can't have it then she can't either. Our ideas in America, we weren't born with them, weren't given them by God or monkey. We grew to develop them, to learn them, to become civilized, only because we have to the time to care about such things. We are spoiled with that. And it's only because we have protected, fought and died for the right to do so! We don't have a gas ration, a food ration because we've worked so hard not to have those inconveniences in our lives.
So we've spent more money, lost fewer lives, and felt it less at home than any other war in our nations history, and we've nearly done one more thing; lost the right to recruit within our own country. This is your America, we're just dying to keep it that way.
What's at stake? Liberty.
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