A peculiar characteristic of America over the last 3 years up until recently has been a subtle reduction of body counts reported in the media; moreover, there’s been an even greater dearth of contextual information included in news reporting, no doubt out of fear that someone could get offended by depicting something approaching an “opinion” contrary to the current maladministration in power. Given the propensity of the “body politick” to suppress negative reports involving firearms, it would seem reasonable to suspect that school shootings, police attacks on minorities and other street mass killings have deliberately gone under-reported. It’s certainly a different world from my own 20-something youth though… I remember when the 6 o’clock news used to show the unloading of the caskets fresh off the transport aircraft from Vietnam back in the 60s. The republicans put the brakes on that broadcast television visual after the public lost it’s stomach for funding a mechanized butcher shop for it’s youth; after all, why get all those moms and dads riled up over such silly things as the potential for losing a kid when there’s another Great Patriotic Cause that requires another blood sacrifice so that Corporate America can perpetuate itself? They even enthusiastically voted to end the draft in order to prevent their evil spawn from having to hold a rifle; that way only the poor and Middle Class kids would get to die for the privileged wealthy’s preservation of it’s bloodline — eugenics in its uniquely machiavellian form.
Well, given recent events with the track record of the contemporary republican party and to satiate my curiosity I did a few moment’s worth of basic research and, given that Mr. Trump thinks of himself as a stable genius wartime president, I pulled together some K.I.A. casualty figures from all of the major conflicts from 1950 to the present in which the United States was involved:
- Korea- 36,914 (Truman, Eisenhower)
- Vietnam- 58,220 (Kennedy, Johnson and then Nixon)
- Desert Storm- 383 (Bush 41)
- Iraq War- 4,424 (Bush 43)
- Afghanistan War- 2,372 (Bush 43, Obama, Trump)
So let’s see: for the past 70 years between 1950 and 2020 in military conflicts the total official DOD body count currently stands at 102,313 men and women. That’s 102,000+ military personnel over the terms of eleven presidents. Yet, in just six months, under ONE president who ignored written warnings, who deliberately dismantled and deconstructed the preventative frameworks designed to mitigate the spread of pandemic diseases and then obstructed the assistance, denied its seriousness and continuously mocked and hampered every stage of control and prevention from mask distribution and PPEs to treatment disinformation, over 134,000 civilian men, women and children are currently dead. In six months. In his own country. That’s 32,000 more fatalities than all the war dead over the last 70 years, and that body count continues to climb every day.
Which begs a simple question: what has happened to America over those last 70 years that there’s no universal outrage over that body count? That it no longer gives a damn for either its community or progeny enough to so much as wear a mask and wash their hands? And why are the rest of us generally, our local politicians and law enforcement communities letting those people get away with it when our friends, neighbors and children are dying around us?
And what peculiar moral obscenity is keeping that criminal and his gang of murderous enabling gunsels in office?