Massive Authority

At some point I just stopped doing what i was told, and that's probably where it all went wrong. Or right. Depending on who you ask. I stopped trusting what i heard or saw, started seeing people trying to gain benefit from my obedience.That subtle exploitation is what turned me into a bad son, a bad student, a bad employee, a bad citizen, and a bad boyfriend. I can't wipe the smile off my face and i can't stop staring at the train wreck, I point my finger and fire off my big mouth regardless of it's obnoxious intonation or awkward phrasing. I'm a troublemaker wandering listless in a carefully constructed, but fragile, maze of concrete glass and good intentions.Here you go kids, here's a prime example of what you get when you don't follow the rules, you get a spot outside in the rain, the freedom to come and go as you please and no promise of help if ever you should need it. Do i bely the social contract or am i exercising my rights to their fullest extent? Am I living a life more examined or am I refusing to conform? Is this a dream I'm living or a misguided delusion? Time, the great arbiter, will be the judge i suppose, will show if my path was downward spiraling trajectory full of misery, disappointment, and self induced loneliness, or if from the the outside I find myself inside and making a needed contribution if even in the smallest of ways. Good luck kids, going your own way is long and unpaved road, get ready for the wear and tear.

Over and Over

When I write long winded diatribes on how our lazy nation needs to hang tough in tight quarters, for our honor, for our sanity, for the salvation of our souls, I do not do so lightly. In fact I haven't been able to completely reconcile myself with my own opinion presented in the earlier entry entitled "Riot Face, Strong Heart". It starts off a recollection of my youthful activism and left leaning "soft" radicalism, while the tail end advocates a course of foreign policy akin to that of our current neo-con administration or that of presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain. As you might imagine I am not comfortable putting myself in bed with these kinds of people...








So in order to assuage my own riled nerves and constantly revolving thought process I will continue to examine this problem in a typical spiraling calamitous Jack fashion. Feel free to skip to the next entry.

I wonder where the guns come from. "Their" guns, "Their" bombs. Of course you'll tell me they come from Iran; yes, granted they have passed through the Iranian borders, they may even have been purchased by Iran coiffures, but who made these weapons? Russia, perhaps? Give me the name of the company, I want the NAME of the conglomerate responsible, and with that a list of stock holders, trustees, and board of directors. Who OWNS the munitions factory? When I buy RPG's from some plant in Vladivostok who ends up pocketing that cash? What other companies do they own or hold stock in? Show me the tangled web of intrigue that exists in the modern age and now seems invisible and ignored, where the men who built the guns sell them to the people his own country is fighting against. Tell me straight to my face that this condition doesn't exist in American business, tell me that American purses don't get fat from the squabbling revolutions of Africa or the suicide car bombs in Gaza, tell me that the yolk has been loosened, tell me that I wasn't born, unfortunately, outside of a class of elites, so foreign and alien to my lifestyle that they might as well be from Mars. Tell me that my endless toils and aspirations, no matter how noble and diligent, aren't for naught; tell me I have a shot at happiness, peace and changing this corrupted institutional greed and slavery into a world more like the fairy tale one promised to me by my Saturday morning socialization programming and my positive attitude "can do" icons decorating my sugar crusted, over processed, breakfast cereals.
C'mon just tell me
tell me
LIE TO ME.

Where I make a plea to the conscience and humanity inside of the American public, to not let the good and innocent people of Mesopotamia suffer for our lack of heart and perseverance. Our leaders call for the same action to prolong their unrivaled profits or to further destabilize the area for future plunder and exploitation. Where I feel a duty, as a strong human being and true man of the west, to defend those who cannot defend themselves, Our leaders are not hampered by such heartfelt idealism, they see only dollar signs, feel only the yoke of their masters upon their throat.

My friend Mark Lennon once gave to me this profound truth after a weary discussion of our political woes in the dark year of 2001, he said this " There are no conspiracies, just follow the flow of capital and you will find the truth" he may have borrowed it, he may have conceived on his own, it makes no difference, it began a firing in my imagination that became the cascade of simple undeniable truth to the sorrowful state of mankind presently and ever in the past. Greed is the sole motivator of all humanities evil. Greed for money, for land, for power, for status, all other things fall beneath it as the father of our suffering. So when I make emotional pleas for self sacrifice to benefit the people whom we have needlessly victimized under the banner of "liberation", I do so out of the foolish dream of turning the next corner in the evolution of civilization. To grow as a society out of the infantile squabbling and greed laden, land and resource grabbing, into a more mature and enlightened state, one that isn't afraid to admit it is wrong, one that can exert force but may also yield, an advanced technique in all games of strategy, in interpersonal relations, but not in the affairs of nations?

I want to make my case to the grey faced career politicians who are are content to be carried along by the currents of financiers, bankers, and the industrial military complex, and not by intelligence, conscience and a DESIRE to see things made BETTER. We are cursed to have our finest and noblest lead lives of poverty and charity while the gilded crowns and thrones of the Earth are occupied by unenviable slime and detritus from the fecal afterbirth of Mammon. Their chains of persuasion and control emanate from every media source lulling my friends and fellow true hearts into a static filled sleep, an apathy that casts them adrift, lobotomized from their creative faculty, hope for the future, essential divinity and power.

These are the conditions that induced me to wander, that have instilled me with an almost insurmountable ennui. This is the world that I live in and love and yet cannot bear to look at, this is the cruel bitch mother that I will never forgive. I would shed my humanity and run the hills like the desert dog that I am, if only I could choose a transmutation of form over this eventual withering of spirit and gradual defeat of my most shinning hopes and dreams for the world. I have had my eyes blinded by the glory of the lie that I live under, that I tell myself, that we all whisper before we go to sleep to keep from going mad and throwing ourselves onto the roadways, into the nuclear reactors, onto the rails and electrical lines.
"Sleep" we whisper "Everything is going to be alright."

Everything is not going to be alright and we know it. All our lives we have been fed the "America the beautiful" line of bullshit, about the triumph of capitalism and democracy over the forces of tyranny and exploitation. All I see is rule of money over the battered peoples of the world, no government is above its influence, no individual unable to be bought, borders have become arbitrary distinctions of land masses, for the arms and meddling fingers of the wealthy reach from the industrialized food industry of the American mid-west, to the blood diamonds of Africa, into the forges and factories of China. The masters of the world sit high upon their limitless treasures, and they have become like the devil himself and have convinced the world they don't exist. The beauty is they are not a conspiracy ,they do not have an agenda outside of creating and keeping more of the worlds wealth for themselves, wielding more influence in the arenas of governance to further this aim and living above the rule and laws of man, behaving how they see fit.

I can't see anyway out of this situation but what was done before, to realize them, the god kings of man and go to their homes one and all to drag them into the streets, opening their well fed bodies up from balls to brain and turning their insides out, for the feast of rats and wild dogs; To tear down their palaces and redistribute the riches they have hoarded, but how to keep things from returning to their current state? Isn't it in human nature to want one more morsel of bread then the man next to you? And so I despair, because in the end I can have no answer, my desire for revolution and retribution is fed by my own jealousy and desire for the power and status denied to me by fate. This is why I wander, this is why I cast off the burdens of the world and sit amongst the flowers, this is why giving up has never been so close, the final tap out to the world at hand, where I turn my back on the ways of society and wander into the wilder realms of experience alone and speak only to myself. What is there to do that is worth doing? How can the truly world weary ever overcome his vision of the futility and purposelessness of a human life? I have long needed a reason to go on living, and nigh has one ever been ready, but I persist as per our fundamental function, and I wait to one day cross the path of meaning in this world, so that i might have something new to cry about. Instead of oppression, corruption and cruelty, I can whine about having too much work to do. What a blessed day that will be.

Galactic Pizza

I wanna know when I'm gonna get my pow-wow with the crystal shard machine elves that live in the walls of my closet. Not that I actually have a closet but regardless, there is whole multi dimensional megaplex back there full of swirling fractal reality and a couple of next level Keebler motherfuckers cooking up coincidence cakes and sugary syncronicities. Last night they were kicking up such an unholy racket that my Stevie Wonder record kept skipping and my phone was blowing up with calls from a low pressure system that wanted to come piss on the Basin. I wanna know when those shiny pricks are gonna sit down and tell me why I can't get a good slice of the live stuff and why I can eat tacos on every corner of this god forsaken grid, yet there isn't a decent sandwich shop for twenty miles. I'm not asking for some kind of Outer-Ring Stellar Subs, or Big Time Galactic Pizza, I just want a thick slice piled high with the goodies and maybe one corner deli or bodega that can throw some Boar's Head on my sangie for fucks sake. These little mojo gremlins are tinkering with my life line and you're telling me they can't maneuver me into the realm of nominal culinary competency, what am I some kind of jerk? So I think I may have no other choice than to batch up a brew of Ms. Aye and go frog swim in the kaleidescope madness in between breathes, that way i can kick these shimmery union ass clowns in their shiny Elvin asses and set the world to rights. Don't fuck with a Rhodie when he wants a square piece or deprive him of his cold cut compensation, things be gettin' heated in the multi-verse. Don't even try to pull the old "beyond my comprehension of three dimensional space and time" routine, cuz I can whoop some ass and you, my mischievous crystalline friends, are fucking with my num nums. Best rectify boys. Best. They don't call me Dynamo because I DON'T drag Old Testament ghosts through the quantum fracture in my "Return of the Jedi" wallpaper and slap them upside their glistening grey-scale approximations of anatomy. No. They Call me Dynamo cuz I'm the only motherfucker on the block who will kick down the doors of perception just to go knuckle down on some astral tricksters and boot their sorry jewel encrusted hypers-faces back to the larvae belching, insectoid mother of creation and all her panorama bubbles of shared consciousness. Takes a tribe to raise a child right? Takes an Action Jack to get some decent food around here...or so it would seem. So get on the ball you wonky star brats, I am straight starving over here and the Twinie bomb is calling my name.
Tally Ho.

Rip It Wide Open

Watch the kid go with those other funny color wearing folks. Their jeans are tight and ripping at the knees, wrist bangles jangling to the mixed up rhythms of a dance genre stew being stomped out of cabinet speakers spray painted with absurdist day-glo slogans. The DJ spins vinyl only and is covered head to toe in a color clash nightmare of a knit body suit that sports the approximation of a beard and covers him head to toe. They bounce and flail , they imitate the customary dances and de-evolve into to visceral gesticulations of their own. Nothing stops the beat, nothing stops the mayhem. They fuel it with booze, drugs and candy, they induce trance states with strobe lights and heart stopping bass, they push everything to the limit aiming to break. The sound starts with disco that gets married to hip hop, that has an affair with electro, that gives birth to house; somewhere in the mixing board the eternal feedback purity of harsh noise combines with drum and bass, succeeding in leveling anyone who tries to stand against it. The kids move together, the kids move apart, they have physical conversations and screaming fits, they ride their youth and chemistry clear into the new day and pay little consequence for the dare. Blessed is the youth that dance with all their hearts and blessed are the old that still try.. Rip it wide open colorful ones, amalgamations of everything you ever heard or saw, give me something to sing about in your celebration for celebrations sake. Rescue us from the grey and inform the night that we’re going to push it until the break of day.

Total Asiaphile

You can call it that, my hopeless infatuation with my little Japanese girl, but i think it goes way beyond her country of origin. This Lady has proven time and again that she loves me true. Love isn't a word that holds much stock for me, but no other assemblage of meanings matches the state that I so fortunately enjoy with this divine messenger from the east. She's my protector, she is my sage, I have traveled the long empty roads of a nation without a soul and she has guarded me from evil, amen. When the summer heat bears down, boiling my brain, she is a cool breeze, when the moon follows us home after a long dance, she is my view of the heavens. When I am alone and far from home she is my one comfort, when all others have turned me away she is my home. I dare say she is the one person that has never failed me; granted our relationship needs constant maintenance but it's worth every minute and every penny in order to rest easy on the absolute assurance that she will never let me down. I feel lost when I'm without her, and the thought of being apart causes hollow pangs of loneliness to grow from the base of my manhood and climb screaming into my stomach and heart, rendering me helpless against the eternal march of time, decay and our shared mortality. She is my revelation, she is my cure, she is my one unfaltering ally that poets and songsmiths have promised. She is a friend in the truest sense of the word, she is my light in the dark, and I can say, in all honesty, without her I would truly have and be nothing. This is to you, my darling, may we be together forever. Love, gratitude, respect and worship. I thank you for every moment you give to me.


I love you Civic EX, and when I die I hope that I die inside you.

Gee Oh Dee

My mother was the only other person in the room, the only other sound was the persistent beat of Gramma’s heart monitor. Mom motioned for me to sit next to her beside the bed and said to Gramma “ Mom, Jack is here to see you.” Gramma’s eyes were glued shut with sleep secretions, her face hung sallow off her bones. I watched her lips tremble for a second and heard the faintest of wheezes. That’s when I turned my heard away to press back the stinging in my eyes and sinuses. This is it, she is going to die today. Mom held her hand, which was blackened with constant bruising , heavy medications had left her flesh the consistency of overcooked chicken and the slightest touch liquefied her muscles and turned her skin a dark viscous color. She had been like this for almost a year, in this “home” filled with the mediciney smell of industrial cleanser, all alone with her memories and the other elderly who had given up
and were waiting to die. This was a bad place, a place that I hated and never wanted to be. This was a forlorn state of being, and as I sat there watching her, watching this fading image of a person I only knew in living color, I wondered what would make a person persist in this state, when death was within reach, why they didn’t float down the tunnel and into the light, why they didn’t leave the pain and suffering of this world behind and ascend to the next glorious level of existence at the promised right hand of our father. Was it a passion and reverence for life? Was it to settle unfinished business and bid farewell to loved ones? Was it waiting for the gates of eternity to open and to rise out of the mortal coil, carving a blazing trail of ethereal beauty through all seven dimensions of God’s divine creation?

No.
Of course not.

They persist in their tortured corporeal forms because their alternative is the abyss, the inky black void of non existence, and they are afraid. Yes, afraid because life is warm and life is good and death is colder than outer space. They say death is the unknown but I disagree, death is so terrifying because we ALL know what the void is, it’s where we came from, and somewhere deep in the recess of our beings we know the horror and agony of Nothing.

“the dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive”-Pvt. Joker Full Metal Jacket

I heard someone once speak about how the here and now is heaven, the best its going to get, and to start enjoying it because it’s the only respite we get from the big dark empty. The terror must be unspeakably powerful to make person choose constant agony, the worst experience in life, the persistent state of incredible pain and torment, over the cold comfort of nothingness. I don’t believe in god or heaven but not because it’s all stories about clouds and saints and puppy farms where we can chase squirrels forever. No, I don’t believe because people have to be convinced that a deity exists, they have to be threatened with punishment to obey the odd social morays and taboos of their particular sect or religion. I don’t believe because If my mother hadn’t built an invisible boogeyman in my mind to keep me from kicking my sister and playing with my peepee than never in a million years could I have dreamed up such a ridiculous circumstance. I just would have known, this is what is and it is good, and I shall cherish it throughout all my grass stained dirty faced days. Most of all I don't believe because I watched a woman wither and die, and never once did I see a glimmer of hope in her eyes that something better lay beyond. I only saw pain, fear and pain.

Don’t misunderstand me, this doesn’t make me amoral, far from it, I am big on life and living. I’m all about getting along with each other and attempting squeeze the maximum fun factor out of every minute of my lifetime. If I had things my way, we would all be running around in an H.R. Puff n’ Stuff ,tripped out, super fantasy porno, constantly eating awesome food, drinking the good wine, and getting our sex organs pampered with over stimulation. I guess in lieu of that reality I’ll just have to make due with what I got. I’m just not about to live my life in accordance with arcane rules and standards in order to gain entrance into some misty fairy land at the other end of the space time continuum. Especially when it generally requires depriving myself of some of life’s finest pleasures and arbitrarily hating someone else, who otherwise could be an potential super friend and good time pal, based on their race, creed, color, belief system, or a thousand year old blood feud. All set.

Now for any of you who are true believers out there, for those of you who think that my heathen ass is going to perish in eternal heck fire for my blasphemous stance on the afterlife; I sincerely hope that I am mistaken. I hope there is something beyond the inconceivable lack of substance that awaits us in the end. I hope I die and wake up in the supermarket, with all the pizza and peanut butter cup ice cream I can eat. I hope I end up in the Elysian fields (Elysian Park will do; on a Sunday afternoon in springtime when the Mexican families are having barbecues and their kids are taking swings at piñata stuffed with sugary goodness.). Hell, I hope I wake up in the DMV in Pawtucket Rhode Island, a fate worse than death some might say, but hey, something , ANYTHING is better than nothing. The problem is, it remains very much unknowable so I try not to worry about it and attempt to deal more with the here and now. As far as Mr.Death is concerned, the check is in the mail, it’s not like we won’t find out eventually, so in a hopeful conclusion to this otherwise dour and troubling piece, I say we all should cross that bridge when we get there, because maybe the reason nobody comes back from the dead to tell us all about it is because its so sweet, so RAD that they don’t want to ruin the surprise.

…and they better not eat all the god damned pizza, lest afterlife asses need kicking.

Riot Face, Strong Heart

I had tried to wake up Artie, but he just farted and went back to sleep. I waited in the cold alone, blowing into my hands because the heater in my car was broken. The bus was supposed to have arrived at 6:30am and it was almost 8:00 before it showed up. One by one we piled on, until the greyhound was filled to capacity. I didn’t know anyone else on board but we shared one thing besides a mutual destination, we didn’t want our country to go to war and we were meeting half of a million other like minded citizens in New York city to let the world know.


It started off as a riotous cacophony of voices and chants. People brought instruments and there was music drifting out of the long serpentine river of bodies that drifted through the city. We sang and we danced and it was good, it felt like we were doing something, like all of us together might make a difference. It was two years after September 11 and the nation was still shaken, the impetus to get revenge was palpable, but we in the streets had the will to resist the temptation. We weren’t going to give in to our baser instincts, we would rise above and persevere.

The police closed in around three o’clock in the afternoon, they bisected the parade at the intersections using horses and shields. People resisted but most dispersed, for the stubborn they had tear gas and hoses, for the fearless they had clubs. I saw a girl get kicked flat in her chest that day, I saw a boy being dragged face down along the asphalt. I didn’t know what to do, it seemed so wrong that they could just push us around like this, wasn’t this our right, as citizens, to peacefully assemble? I was really scared, there were riot cops, faceless, with shields and batons pushing us back, the gas was drifting down our way from a spot up the street. Someone had given me and orange handkerchief earlier, he said "in case you need it". I thought he meant if I needed to sneeze. I tied the rag over my nose and mouth, and clasped my hands behind my back, I dropped my weight and centered my stance and with all my secret kung fu knowledge resolved not to be moved from where I stood.

I don’t know why I did it really, I don’t know what I thought it would do, I just didn’t want to let these anonymous enforcers dissolve me, silence me, make me obey. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, it was my country that was committing the crime, the war on terror was a travesty and I didn’t want my to be any part of it. They had the horses buck their steel bridles on top on my head, they kicked me from their mounts, and finally one of them came from behind and hit me behind the right knee with a billy club. I quickly found myself being zip tied and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon.

All around me kids were being beaten up and dragged away, it was chaos and the police were efficiently and enthusiastically breaking this protest apart. I felt both terrified and galvanized in my position, there was a clear line as to where I stood, for the first time in my life I suppose. These cops looked at me with disdain, but mine was greater, they pulled the rag off my face and tried to be "bad cops" but I just stared. I had nothing to say, scared to death at what was going to happen to me, but my eyes held the accusation, the challenge that made them look away. They might have just been doing their job, but they were wrong and they knew it.

Inside the wagon I met a few other nice guys, we all shook hands in a silly back to back sort of way with our zip cuffed hands. One of them, Brian from Virginia, had a cell phone that we each took turns calling our friends on. I remember leaving a highly excited message for my friend Jay whom I was supposed to find somewhere in the masses of collected faces that day. The others assured my nerves that what lay in store for us was just a process, a lot of waiting and not much else. I guess they had done this kind of thing before.

They drove us down to central processing, by this time my cuffs were cutting my wrists, drawing tiny droplets of blood to the surface, my arms were numbing up and I wore a sort of grimace. They pulled us out and filed us through and it was there I noticed the most pronounced difference in the police attitude. While the front line cops were frothing at the mouth and spitting their most hateful epitaphs at us, the rear quarter cops looked ashamed of what was happening. I guess that’s the way it goes when you watch almost a thousand people, mostly kids being dragged in, beaten, bloody, and abused by the very people who have sworn to "protect and serve" them. They would offer off handed apologies like " I think you guys have the right to do what you’re doing, we’re just doing our job, it’s not our fault." or even " I’m just waiting to get into the fire department, I don’t want to be a cop." They took more pictures, I for one would love to see mine someday. All brash and defiant in my self righteous 22nd year, sporting my FUCK THE WAR hoodie and the kindling angst that will typify my Millennial generation.

We were held in what I understand is a " drunk tank", huge cells that accommodate hundreds and most typically used for St. Patrick’s day and Puerto Rican day parades, where serious drinkers and gregarious mischief makers can cool off after a long day on the job. It would have been bad if I was alone, but that cell was a pretty good place to be if you had to be stuck somewhere indefinitely. I got thrown in with about two hundred other fist lifters like myself, I was immediately congratulated and welcomed into the flock, I was amongst the others like me, the ones who stood against the tide, I was home. When they brought Jared in I could only smile and say "what’s up man?" he was shocked to see me, and he gave me a big hug, and pretty much became the best jail buddy you could ask for. I had grown up with Jared in the town of Lincoln, we played football together at Lincoln high, and we went out causing trouble together on many occasions, once he even called my Mother when after a run in with Police I ended up stranded on the other side of town way past curfew and he, being older and class president, tried to smooth things over (unsuccessfully) . He was a the same age as my older brother and had gone on to become a outspoken local activist and poet. Funny. It was funny to see us both sitting there, I was still totally overwhelmed by what was happening and terrified of the consequences of what I had done. Was I a traitor? Were they going to deport me? Am I going to trial? Am I going to prison? I didn’t voice any of this, but Jared could tell I was nervous, he helped calm me down, and I was grateful to have friend there, I knew he would look out for me. That’s when one of the other detainees got on top of a bench and started to speak " Hi, my name is Michael and I am an attorney at law, and I want to tell you what your rights are, and what they can and can’t do to you".
Dumb fucking luck.

We spent eight hours in that cell. Michael, the lawyer, gave us the lowdown ; basically they were going to interrogate us, idly threaten us and let us go. There was nothing they could really do, after all there were at least five hundred of us in this building alone, and they couldn’t possibly supply adequate and humane facilities to us, we were in the shade. We passed the time by talking to each other, retelling our story of how we got nabbed, and listening to impromptu freestyle sessions between those so inclined, while drumming out beats on the bars and benches in the jail cell. It got a kind of feel good hippie vibe in there, it was all "we shall overcome" and " peace , love and civil disobedience". While we were together we were the good guys and we were united against the dumpy boys in blue on the outside of the cell, we told them jokes and sang their praises when they came in and they couldn’t help but laugh despite their impenetrable veneers. They had separated the men and women into different cells, but when they started the interrogations and releases, they had to parade the women by our cell to the interrogation rooms. We cheered, beat the bars, chanted love songs, and feminist slogans. They blew kisses, shook their hands together like champions and screamed populist rally cries, and we couldn’t help smiling knowing that release was eminent and once we hit the street again we will have our voices back we will have won.

The fat detective asked me a lot of questions, but I didn’t answer any of them, I just replied " no comment". He told me If I didn’t cooperate I was going to go downtown to the city jail, with some bad black men who would love to get their hands on me.
I laughed because Michael had told us the cops would say something like " they will bring you downtown or to Rikers Island and you’ll get sodomized by row after row of big scary black men" as one of their idle threats. The fat detective didn’t appreciate my disrespect so he got close and did the whole "super close spit talking routine" in my face, I just averted my eyes and repeated my mantra " No…Comment". He dragged me back to the cell and told me to have fun rotting in there. Before the cell door even closed my name was called again, I was cut loose.

After you’ve been in a small room with three hundred other guys for eight hours straight, no food, water or bathroom facilities, coming out into downtown Manhattan is some kind of surreal revelation. I was greeted by a large group of supporters, other members of the protest or affiliated groups, that had camped out in front of the central processing building, with hot coffee, doughnuts and hugs.
RULE. Yes, it kept being reaffirmed, I did a good thing this day, took it to the fullest extent, went on the record to say that this war and the new slate of foreign and domestic policies were a mistake, were against our own best interests, were bad for America. I stood with many others who felt the same way and could probably articulate their thoughts and feelings much more eloquently than I can, but I was there to say no, no more blood, we have suffered enough already.

Back at the University of Rhode Island, not many people shared my view, frequently during class discussions of this critical topic I was called a "traitor" and " Un American" .I’m sure many of the other people who I shared that cell in March had to absorb these same kinds of insults. Five years and 4003 dead Americans soldiers later, public opinion has finally caught up to us, finally sobered from their hate laden bloodlust after young members of their own communities came home in boxes or missing limbs. 29, 541 American servicemen and women have been wounded since this whole affair began, and finally people have had enough. They want to call it quits, want to call it a mistake, want to pin it on Bush like they didn’t go along with it the whole time with their American flag stickers on their SUV’s; but it’s too late to go back., it’s too late to withdraw. What amazes me most is that the entire Baby-boomer generation, which prides itself on it’s youthful political activism and its valiant championing of civil rights and the end to violence in Vietnam, could have wholesale sold their OWN CHILDREN down the river to the same kind of imperialist war of occupation that they struggled so hard to end? How did they not see the writing on the wall? Was it not obvious how all this would play out? I was only a child, 23 and greener than a golf course and I knew that this would end bad, it would be nothing but blood and tears. Now they want a big change, now everyone wants out, get out of Iraq, end the war, bring the soldiers home. Well I wish they could come home too, I wish they never left; but if there is any hope for us, if there is any hope for a free Iraq and a stable middle east and a safe America, we cannot back out now.

There comes a time when we all have to grow up. We have to accept responsibly for ourselves and our actions. The United States is a young culture, a strong culture, and a very immature culture. We came to the opportunistic rescue of our European allies sixty years ago and watched as the old imperial power structures crumbled and the new American free market became the dominate force on the planet. We used our power recklessly, over turning popularly elected governments in favor of puppet states our companies could exploit (cough, Vietnam, cough) We created Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin laden, all "assets" funded, supplied and trained by fat Yankee treasures. Our grandfathers never had to realize their own consequences, as they had passed into senility and dust by the time one of our "assets" drove two jet airliners full of American citizens into the twin towers of the World Trade Center . Let that be the lesson, let us learn. We went to Iraq for the wrong reasons, we waged a war that was by all rule and principle , a criminal act. That war is over. Now there exists a fractured society, that was once held together by fear and fist and now has been haphazardly glued with good intentions. Iraq is a state that was carved
out of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the Great War, it’s borders were arbitrarily drawn by British bureaucrats. It has bound tightly disparate tribes of peoples (Sunni, Shiite, Kurds) who have a history of "not getting along" and no experience with self rule. These people have been under a autocratic regime since prehistory, they are used to one strong voice telling them what to do. If we leave now, there will no one strong enough to resist the well funded , well trained, and zealotous forces of Radical Fundamentalism from taking control of the state.

I don’t want to be mired in an almost endless struggle to stand a fledgling Iraqi state on it’s feet, or wait the thirty some odd years for reconciliations to take place amongst the various tribes and ethnic minorities. I don’t want to dump trillions of tax dollars into the desert just to say we did what we said we were going to do, bake up a free and democratic Iraqi cake.
No.
I want to do those things because WE OWE IT TO THEM.


We owe it to the kids whose fathers got blown up because they worked next door to a viable target, we owe it to the mothers whose children were "collateral damage", we owe it to the Fathers who were kidnapped and stolen to Guantanamo or murdered by a rival tribe in the chaotic aftermath of the invasion that we headed, brash, brazen, hooting and hollering. We owe it to the simple people of that country, who went to sleep one day with a very stable government , albeit headed by a sociopath but a reliable sociopath ( maybe not so much different than ourselves?) and they woke up the next day to a living hell that has persisted for the past five years. We promised these people everything, we told them they would get schools like ours, free choice like ours, clean water , power, and food, PEACE we promised them PEACE. IF the forces of Fundamentalist Religious Extremism take hold of their lives then they will never know peace, they will never know the freedom that we know. Believe me I have my qualms with this broad nation of ours, but I know that it is the best thing going, I want those people to have what I have because, goddamn it ,THEY’VE EARNED IT. They have bled and suffered enough, over a million total deaths, and if we disappear on them now there is no telling how bad it will get. Guess what, when the kids are grown and look back and the misery that is their lives you know what they will see? Some semblance of stability before WE came, then terror, chaos , blood and loss, and how we left them to fend for themselves because we only care about ourselves and our money. They will hate us. Then you have on your hands, the most cunning and inventive weapon of all, a hate filled human mind. I’m sure through the forces of social construction and indoctrination their hate can be finely crafted and honed until ten years from now WE, the Millennials and our children, not our parents, will be faced with a entire generation of weapons, deadset on reciprocating the chaos that we have visited upon them.

That is why I say we stay. That’s why I say we have to eat this one. America needs to shut up, grow up, and MAN the fuck up and deal with the mess we have created. The entire world watched us do this, and they will watch to see what we do next, if we really are force of freedom and democracy, if we really are a nation full of good, compassionate souls who are trying to raise the world out of the strife and despair that it has known for ten thousand years, then we need to show that we are mature enough and strong enough to admit we were wrong and to use our power to correct our mistake. It is still possible to save them, it is still possible to give them the bright and glorious future promised, they will stand up and claim it for themselves if we can be the light that shows them the way. This would be the greatest work of our young nation, this would make us great, not our wars or our television shows, but our heart and our commitment to doing right no matter the cost. I think we can be that great, the question is, do you?

I stand up for what I believe in, and I’m an American whether we are right or wrong, I will do my best to help steer this nation in a responsible direction. I support my troops, and very much believe in their mission, I am against the war, now and forever, but I am also against giving up on the people we have promised to help, I am against giving in, I am against letting them suffer. This isn’t going to be easy, this will cost us dearly, but on the other end we will have learned, grown smarter, done good for the world, and we will not be fooled again.