And With This, The Misery Sets In...

Toward the end of my ridiculously long previous post I touched on something that has been bothering the hell out of me for a while now. I have kept it in check with a combination of attitude, humor, reading, and calling home, not to mention listening to some angry music and smashing things. Unfortunately, lately I haven’t been able to keep it in check any longer. So I am going to try writing about it and see if that helps.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, here’s the quote, “The fact that our war, our battle, the great test of my generation is being stolen from us by a group of bloodless, lifeless, and cowardly politicians. Fuck them guys.”

I probably could’ve said it a bit better but the words were flowing out of me at the time, and I didn’t really feel like editing myself, so I ran with it.

So the best I can do right now is to examine the statement bit by bit. I guess for continuity’s sake we’ll begin with the first part.

“Our war, our battle, the great test of my generation”

Hopefully, unless you’re brain dead that statement is fairly self-explanatory. This is the battle that we’ve got. We haven’t got another one. The days of the great world wars are over, there is entirely too much commerce going on for another real world war. So be it. I can deal with that part of it. This is the battle that was chosen for my generation to fight. We were called out on September 11, 2001 and we responded in kind. Had we been left to our own devices and not co-opted and controlled by the fucking politicians this war would have gone a lot different.

The part of that, that I cannot come to grips with is the final piece. This is the great test of my generation. We grew up in the lap of unparalleled wealth, and unabashed laziness. We were given the best of everything. Food, leisure, education, clothes, and everything else. Very few of us ever did without, and when we did, oh were we ever pissed off about it. You want to get the American public behind a war, tell them that MTV won’t be on the air again until we kick the shit out of our enemies.

Now this sucks. I see this whole thing as the test that had the potential to drag us out of our sedentary, useless, lifeless lives. Try to find a pulse in your average American, you aren’t going to find it easily. Now it isn’t everyone. There are those who want to fight, who want to win, who want to know the exhilaration, who want all of it. But there are so many more who just want things to be comfortable, who want things to be easy, who want their life to be planned, who want everything to be handed to them, who like being semi conscious zombies...

How very depressing...

Unfortunately, the zombies are the ones who run this place. They are the ones who decide our missions. They don’t want to risk any damage to their careers so they will not send us on any missions that mean anything. They don’t want to risk damaging a vehicle and having to explain it, so they keep us so far from harm that there is no way we could accomplish anything even remotely resembling a victory in battle. They are so terrified that someone might get hurt, and they would have to answer for it that they keep us here, paralyzed, doing nothing. It feels as though we are just killing time from one end of the deployment to the other.

And now for the rest...”is being stolen from us by a group of bloodless, lifeless, and cowardly politicians.”

Those are the guys I am talking about. Not only are these pieces of shit in Washington, but they are here also. We call them officers.

Bloodless, I have never met another group of people in my life who are more terrified of getting into any kind of trouble than these guys. I don’t understand it, and I hope that I never do. Prior to turning 25 I used to live to get into trouble. The bigger the better.

Lifeless, they have a chance here. A chance to truly make a difference. To change some of the things that have, and are going on here. They are the ones who make the decisions, give the orders, and ensure that things are done right. Yet, they choose to toe the line, they choose to make everything look real pretty on paper, they are the ones who chose to never risk anything here. They have chosen to bide their time, to do what they need to do to get by and nothing more, and to leave this place in the exact same condition as when they found it. Not an ounce of life in that.

Cowardly, I think I have made it abundantly clear they are just that.

Politicians. I read somewhere that the word “politics” is a combination of “poli” meaning: many, and “tics” meaning: blood sucking parasites. I don’t think you can get any more accurate than that.

And finally, “Fuck them guys”

Do I really need to elaborate on that...

I am done now.

Later.

I love you mom...