I have only pieces of Douglas Barber’s story, but I assure you it will be out in full soon. It will bounce around concerned circles, somewhere in the middle of the news paper. The institution will report that things are getting better and all the citizen zombies will nod and go back to eating brains and watching tv. No real changes will take place and the veterans will continue to suffer. We will become desensitized to stories of veteran suicides and the journalists will all say “We just did an article on that, so we aren’t interested in another.” and Americans will lose sight of the issue until it happens to the neighbor’s son or Cousin Joe Bob. We don’t have the attention span to really care about each other and it is always someone else’s problem.
So slap a yellow ribbon on your SUV and don’t cry foul when some drunk vet comes slamming into your wagon killing your kids or a desperate homeless war hero is knocking over the liquor store and guns down grandma, because he thinks he is putting forty out of forty in the black of an insurgent silhouette.
And don’t point fingers if recruiting is down. You convince a kid to go into the war machine when he sees vets coming out the other end in coffins, wheel chairs, and straight jackets. People might not be spitting in the faces of the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan War, but they may as well be pissing on us. If apathetic America is to busy drinking Star Bucks and shopping at Wal-Mart to notice there is a big problem with the Vets and this whole War On Terror then this whole country has it’s neck in the slaughter stock waiting for the blade to fall.
To Douglas and all the dead soldiers and dying vets, keep a pot of coffee on. We will all see you in hell soon enough.
The Heretic
Douglas Barber’s Blog “Soldier For Truth“
I came across this post looking for G.I. Special, which is either out for good or down due some technical glitch. But William Bowles has Thomas Barton’s most recent dispatch in pdf.
It angered Barber the Bush administration restricted access to flag draped caskets. He felt the ultimate dishonouring of a soldier’s life was refusing to acknowledge his death. I’m floored by the brevity of their pasts and the futures lost, the high school head shots and boot camp grad photos of kids who trusted or surrendered to a system that set them up for a senseless and avoidable slaughter. The manic governor in my state is talking big about imposing curfews on teenage drivers, framed by the DLC’s family values rhetoric so Democrats appear more moral than the GOP (county and state fine collectors and insurance adjustors are salivating I assume), whereby the family is relieved of the right to make these decisions for themselves. These same politicians are perfectly okay with putting a gun into a teenager’s hands and asking them to murder in the name of what? So Jenna can dance on a couch and Barbara can seem less trashy than she did at the last party?
