Forward Towards a Brighter Memorial Day

On this Memorial Day may we never forget how many millions of lives are affected directly, and indirectly, by the decisions of so few among our ranks. May we demand, out of respect for the lives lost and the permanently wounded, that more light be shed on this growing giant; this unquestioned black hole of wasted money and unlimited power that parades as military "defense", all while enjoying virtually no accountability to the public that eventually become the victims of the process. It's slowly becoming like some holy sacred rite never to be questioned, proof of your "patriotism"; all while eating away at the base of our national dignity, killing our youth in battle, and forcing our children to grow up in a never-ending cycle of conflict and debt. It never gets graded; gets no report card, or evaluation. It mostly gets a free pass, never a fail. 

We need intelligence, surveillance, and technology, not gun powder and nuclear bombs in this new age of war. We need to stop supplying fresh target meat for an insane religious war machine that thrives on an enemy for its very life blood. We need to stop using our citizens as fuel for a murderous Jihadist cause; giving our enemies an endless recruitment strategy for generations to come. We need to mind our own business and stop spending away our future trying to police the world. 

May we always memorialize the lives lost, but may we NEVER stop asking questions that help us become safer here at home without sacrificing so many at such an immeasurable cost. We can do better, and to not think so belongs to the thinking of the insane. We can and we must do better looking forward toward a brighter future, not a future filled with more inevitable loss and tragedy.

Something Else

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

There's no one who tried harder to paint a more honest heart felt view of humanity than did Ernest Becker. He grapples with life's struggle inside the central nervous system of the human being.
 J.M