Antonin Scalia, 1936-2016.
Shit just got real.
I have a couple friends who lived in and around the Troubles, and also people who lived in and around the Rwandan genocide. The Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime” is actually about living in Alphabet City, but it has other, further reaching applications.
While it may sound cool to be a part of an insurrection, I want no part of it. I saw enough of that through the eyes of friends to know it’s not fun. I’m really invested in peaceful change, and I fear we are ripe for the other kind. May G-d have mercy upon our souls.
To easy to be one of the statics. Sporty change is bad. Probably what we will get, but bad none the less.
I spent a summer of my oft-misguide youth, taking recent arrivals from South Vietnam, backpacking into the Sequoia Mountains in central CA.
They ranged from a kid of my age (then, 16), to a RVAF Major, a pilot, who had escaped with a serious bounty on his head.
We took eight of them on a 10 day hike to above timberline, with a like number of us able and fit volunteers from church.
The stories they told, mostly through said Major’s interpreting, were chilling, raw and real.
“Sporty” is a polite term, indeed.
If we experience “troubles” here, it’ll make Belfast look like a vacation brochure, and I’m agreed.
We do NOT want that.
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
It hurts. Having worn the uniform, and sworn the oath, to see how much it has changed in the past 20-30 years (especially within the last 5-10). To see both sides of the political spectrum (at least “party-wise”) not as the passionate lust-inducing starlet, but rather the pockmarked, rank smelling, diseased riddled whores they really are.
And for those advocating “Well, now it’s time for a shooting war…time to show those (of the other side) we mean business…we’re not gonna take this anymore…”
And yes, there is now, or soon will be, a time…or a line crossed…which will allow for no other choice than arms to be taken up, causes to be trumpeted, and “Johnny will be off to war again”.
It will make the Civil War look like a walk in the park. And aside from the massive bloodshed, the destruction of families, and all else, what is going to be left after it is over?
I fear we will be Yugoslavia rit large. A balkanization on a massive scale.
One thing is for certain. We will never be the same, this country will never be the same.
But to those fools who think all the old vets out there are lusting for this to happen….they are talking out their butts. We might see the “need”…we might feel the obligation to the oath we took and honored for all those years…but there (and there are exceptions to every rule) are a very small few who look forward to this, who willingly run to the sound of cannons…just the foolish, the brave, and the dead.
God help us all.
I hope we can avoid anything drastic.
I pray we can avoid anything drastic.
I will vote, and do anything else I can do avoid it.
But it will take many people to resolve this peacefully as we have for the last 150 years.
I console myself that, at age 52, I’m not likely to live long enough to see another Civil War (and I didn’t leave any children to see one). If I’m mistaken about the timeline, as Rocket said in Guardians of the Galaxy “Awww, what the Hell, I don’t got that long a lifespan anyway.”
No American truly wants to go to war. Many of our ancestors came here in the first instance in order to get away from incessant war.
I strongly believe that’s one of the things that makes Americans so terrible (in the old sense) in battle. If we fight you, it’s because you’ve pissed us off, and we’re going to finish you come hell or high water. The line attributed after Pearl Harbor to Yamamoto Isoroku pretty much says it all, regardless of whether he actually said it or not.
(I write all of the above strictly as an historian, and not as a veteran. It’s based on a close read of historical American attitudes about war and at least partly on what my Dad — who did serve, in wartime — had to say about it.)
Indeed, Nathan, indeed.
What is happening in the USA with all the race baiting seems to be happening here at the tip of Africa… and then you have the EU being flooded with those unwilling to let go of an evil ideology that they actually fled from…
Seems like the world is going to go up in flames if we like it or not. :-(