Today was Veteran’s Day or a day where I get to drive in to work on the highways without feeling like I was trapped in a parking lot. Seriously, all the Federal workers had off so I got to drive on the interstate and not have to deal with heavy traffic. And so, I salute our veterans for giving me a chance to get to work in less than half an hour.
On the other hand, I had to suffer through the whole military worship throughout the day as I read my usual blogs and listened to my usual radio shows. Naturally being a soldier is a hard job and anyone who doesn’t come back from combat with severe mental issues is probably a sociopath and should be watched carefully. But at the same time, I feel like we’re abusing our soldiers in various foreign conflicts that are of no benefit to the United States. Moreover, the worship I keep on hearing only seems to reinforce my anger toward our government leaders.
The sad fact is that the past 60 years of foreign wars have not been constitutional wars at all. Thousands of soldiers have lost their lives and many more have been permanently mutilated for unconstitutional foreign conflicts. It really sickens when people don’t realize that and continue to insist that their sacrifice wasn’t in vain.
I feel like I’m one of the few people who say that they are being wasted. We are losing good people who would otherwise be a powerful asset for this nation all because Congress can’t get off its ass and vote for an official declaration of war. It is unfortunate that Congress continues to blatantly ignore the Constitution in these matters and what’s more, most people seem to not notice.
Now we have Senator Lindsay Graham, the gay neocon, proposing a war with Iran. The sad fact is that President Obama may very go along with it because every great Democrat President has started a war of some kind. And it will take a true liberty-minded Republican to end it, like so many foreign “wars” in the past. It took Eisenhower to end the Korean after Truman started it at the behest of the UN and it took Nixon to stop Vietnam (mostly to get re-elected), after Johnson started it. If the historical pattern holds true, we may see President Obama entering us into a war with Iran, more than likely to save himself in 2012.
Politicians are the worst kind of people to run anything. And we eagerly allow them to send our boys off to wars that are basically illegal. It really makes me sick when I think about the wasted lives.
Meanwhile the military-industrial complex trudges on…