WAR

    "What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!"
   So goes the song of the days of protest. So goes the song of a time when America was almost rent in two, a country so divided that one would think it would never be able to heal the rifts.
     It was a country at war with itself, an undeclared civil war, with civilians facing off against troops and even gunfire on a campus with one shot dead, an iconic moment in American history. Soldiers, many of them draftees, other than those with bone spurs I guess, were reviled when they returned home after fighting a war we never should have been in, a war of uncivilized behaviors on both sides, a war which still has some remnants of the shocked vets wandering the streets, still suffering from a devastating PTSD.
     Did we learn from this? Nope. So many years our soldiers have been out there in the Middle East fighting, suffering from chemical injuries that were not acknowledged in a timely manner, whose PTSD has been ignored and denied, whose Traumatic Brain Injuries and the devastating effect on civilian life has been denied far too many times. Our soldiers have been out there fighting "minor" wars year after year and I wonder what has been accomplished other than the destruction of so much and so many, collateral damage becoming both a dirty word and a word of callousness.
     I am not a conscientous objector. I know that war is sometimes a necessary behavior, WWII being an example for Americans. However, we fight and fight and then never truly solve the issues of the war and inevitably another one arises from the ashes of the previous one. Vicious 'bantam' wars erupt all over the continent of Africa, tribes killing other tribes, including family members. Religions kill and 'cleanse' members of a minority religion and in the next country the system is reversed. We see children starve and parents slaughtered. We see farms and crops destroyed, lands destroyed, and humanity destroyed as it kidnaps children, creating child warriors, child sex slaves and rape of women as an act and weapon of war. One would have thought that by this time humanity would have learned another way of dealing with its problems, but no, we have not advanced there as yet.
     And war has come to the shores, homeland America. We have declared war on our Constitution, on our people. We see the other side as 'opponents', ones that deserve the worst of threats, rules of engagement with civilians changing, biases and prejudices creeping out from the filth of a human swamp, and even people being killed in the name of all these hatreds, from children to the elderly, all types, shapes, sizes, religions, backgrounds, whatever. Nothing seems to matter other than getting one side or another into the winning position.
     We have declared war on ourselves, and in doing so we have ceded the proper wars to the dustheap. War against pollution, against all environmental destruction, against inhumanity, against starvation, for education and the rights of all. Here in America we have rolled ever increasingly backwards, rolling back safety regulations, social safety precautions, anything that gets in the way of attaining power and retaining that power. We have ceded our morality and try to find more than a handful, if that many, of Republican members of the House or Senate or  governmental appointee or elected position who will stand up to the filth, the improprieties of the current administration. The government has become a cesspool of corruption, of selfishness, with governmental apparatus being twisted into personal vehicles of destruction and self advancement, all led by the chief sinner, Trump. 
     Our courts have become partisan places of war, and this year that war, the wars against the rights of women, the rights of sexual minorities, the rights of immigrants, both legal and not, DACA and others, the right to be able to feel safe walking our streets, without checking doors and windows for rifles glinting off the sun or streetlight, of feeling safe within one's house of worship. Not checking auditoriums for paths to exits or places of hiding should a shooter arise with dirty deeds in mind.
     Our own president has declared war on our sovereignty, insisting on calling in and upon foreign countries to interfere in our business, has called down the wrath of governments of the world on his political and personal enemies, and the Republicans have gone along. We have declared war and we are losing. We are losing. We lose when our governmental people turn against the law, refusing to obey judicial orders, when they refuse to face up to what they have done. The worst? How so many people are refusing to see the light, to recognize the massive scam that this man and his cohorts have perpetrated upon the American people and the dangers it has worsened in and to the world and its future existence in the full sense of the word. It is a world where the children are taking the adults to task, rightfully so. Shameful.
     "War tears. War rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins."    (Susan Sontag)