I recently went to Disney World on vacation and cruised to the Bahamas on a 10 day honeymoon trip.
the trip was great and i won't go too much into details because I'm not one to gloat or boast. lets just say the last 10 days of my life were better than yours.
However, there is this whole kind of creepy, cult-like underbelly to Disney World. Don't get me wrong, I had an amazing time and I would love to go again. There is just this whole weird, Orwellian vibe going on.
There was this attraction called The American Adventure...which was very propoganda-ish. The thing was hosted by an animatronic Ben Franklin, who was a staunch Libertarian...a man who would literally shit in his pants if he saw the current state of our nation. They should have got someone to host it who was more like our current influential American leaders...maybe Julius Caesar or King George I.
more below...
I guess blind nationalism just scares me sometimes. I'm glad I live here and I take pride and appreciate the sacrifices people made in the past...but that gratitude and pride is equally matched by the disdain for the people who are currently changing and diminishing the values and principles those people died for.
I wish that people, including some close to me, would remove the learned, subjective blinders from their vision and just take an objective look at whats going on in the world...educate themselves on how we got here...cause and effect actions of our foreign policies...the hypocrisy of having a war on terror and at the same time committing it...we dont put black masks on our faces and cut off journalists heads...instead we do massive bombing campaigns and kill women and children DAILY but do it in camouflage with the stars and stripes painted on our bombs and call it collateral fucking damage.
i just cant support innocent people dying unless that cause is a much much greater good. tell me, what is the greater good here? what have we accomplished? i have yet to talk to someone who can answer this.
Someone said to me once, "Well we got Saddam."
Oh awesome. 650,000 civilians killed, a sovereign, peaceful nation torn to fucking shreds, but we got Saddam. We could've got Saddam 30 goddamn years ago.
Here's a snippet of a letter Mr. Tim S. recently sent me:
I hope a couple people swing from a tree for this shit. The fact that Saddam was hanged so quickly is further proof to me that what he knew could have gotten some people in big trouble. The worst thing about him being hanged so quickly is that he never had a day in world court, no precedent was set with his killing. They hung him for killing 180 some people in the early 1980's. 25 years ago, 10 years before Desert Storm. We were 100 miles outside of Bagdad when H.W. Bush ordered the Army to turnaround, which I have a good friend who was on the front line and according to him the order was bewildering to him and his unit. If these atrocities were already commited why didn't we take him out then?
Why wasn't there a trial at the Hague? He could have been charged with so many offenses, using chemical weapons on Iranians and, ahem, Iraqis, attempted genocide of the Kurds in the north (who we fucked over badly by pulling out early in 1991), his supposed rape rooms, torture, the list goes on. Why not disgrace him in court and show the Muslims who may have followed him all the crimes he commited against his supposed faith? Why not have a chance to interrogate him, to find out where the billions of dollars had gone, where his chemicals supposedly were, what got shipped to Syria, what he did with the supposed "Yelow Cake" uranium that he had supposedly purchased from some supposed Nigerians that was a large part of the basis for this whole catastrofuck?
There is only one answer for this shit, in my mind.
To protect his collaborators. The people who allowed these atrocities and waited for 25 years to use them as an impetus to remove him. Once it was convenient for us.
I have come to realize that a majority of people who support this war do it from a safe distance. They don't really know much about what's going on over there...they have a sort of blind faith that we are America and we're doing good and killing the bad people. But when you throw truth in their face and ask them the hard questions, they freak out or get angry or don't want to talk about it.
People hate Muslims, don't care much for brown people or human life in general, I can understand them supporting this war. Fuck it, who cares right? Blow up the sandniggers.
But what makes me even more upset is those who choose to live vicariously from a safe distance...refusing to look or learn about what the country is doing in their name. the same people who are so eager to wave that flag and salute that anthem, but at the same time refusing to be involved in the most American thing you can do...question your government with unyielding vigilance..always striving to speak your mind, educate yourself, participate, and do your part. This is a democracy, not a fucking TV that you can only watch with mild interest...flipping channels whenever what's on is too disturbing for you.