The annual experience of pontificating politicians and their media stenographers extolling the virtues of the brave, heroic, selfless and dedicated heroes these draft dodgers and service avoiders laud for doing what they would never dream of doing is becoming ever more sickening. Especially as so many veterans are reduced to poverty, unemployment, living in their cars or on the street or wasting away in VA hospitals where budget cuts administered by free market fanatics of the right, center and what passes for a liberal left strengthen market forces at the expense of these quickly forgotten “patriots” who make life safe for minority private profiteers while propagandized into thinking they perform for a fictional majority: The People. Sure. When was the last time a truly representative voice of a majority of that group actually chose to busy itself with bombing, burning, shooting and stabbing people thousands of miles away based on a real, materially experienced threat that they faced and took action to deal with? Of course you all remember it was the day after Santa Claus brought the Easter bunny to dinner after the Tooth Fairy performed their first holy communion bar mitzvah.
And in truth, the overwhelming majority of service people in all branches of the military in all the wars they are falsely lauded for performing as front line killers for those who make the wars and lie them into fighting them, are no more or less than workers earning their daily bread. Some truly join innocently believing they are serving their country and warding off vicious enemies bent on savaging us in our beds, but far more do so because they need jobs, can find no other and see a possible chance for learning a trade or even getting into higher education when they leave the service. A small minority actually engage an enemy while a majority perform the daily tasks of maintaining a multi billion dollar mechanized monstrosity that needs drivers, clerks, craftspeople, cooks, repair workers and hosts of others to serve as foundation for the structure of a vast murder machine. And in many cases, they are even safer in doing so than the average American worker at a bank, school, shopping mall, junk food counter or factory-what few remain in the USA since they do not have to face the highway wars that millions of Americans are involved in every day in seeking wages for survival. We kill more than 500 people every week in the traffic horror that we call a private transportation system and if — and when? — that many military people were killed we’d have as massive an anti-war movement such as this nation has ever seen. We can only hope it doesn’t take that to bring us to our senses and avoid the whole degenerate celebration by ending war and thereby never sending people to kill others and risk their own murders in doing so, all at alleged protection of the very market forces that put them in such danger in the first place.
We need a democratic force to put a stop to all manner of hypocritical posturing by political pimps for profit seeking that is at the root of the most dreadful threat facing humanity. What some call climate change and opponents label as climate denial is really capitalism denial as the major problem that must be solved in order to assure a future for the human race. A stop to war making and its satanic religious beatification through hypocrisy like this annual feast of ghouls who profit in billions from mass murder would be an important step in the direction of such a peaceful future.