Trying to Forget Bond, Iraq's America

These days I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to forget the immense amount of B.S. that is around me in America.  I can't justify that nine years of college somehow have made me different than most other Americans.  Really I am different than the local community which surrounds me.  Partly this is true because of a large generational gap.  My mother and her constituency are thirty years my seniors.  The community in which she lives consists mostly of her compadres, and there is a stark generation gap between them and me.  This must be true of others also.  Fayetteville is not a normal American town.  The presence of Fort Bragg, the world's largest military installation, has something to do with it.  It has been here a long time, and local merchants always have taken advantage of the land-locked G.I.'s.  Contrary to popular propaganda, newly enlisted servicemen often are uneducated, malcontented, misled youths.  It is the job of the army to discipline them and hopefully create useful soldiers.  It must be understood there is a percentage of these soldiers who never make the mark.  They stay involved with crime, and do not feel any responsibility for the security of the American people.  These are bad apples.  Violence in Fayetteville always has been rampant.  It is not difficult to surmise training not-so-educated youths to become fighting machines takes its toll.  Often there is not enough maturity to be able to handle the stress and responsibility of being a fighting machine.  Often they make wrong choices.  G.I. often get into fights in bars, and often bouncers target naive G.I.'s.  Fayetteville has a history of this.  People have been killed in fights at bars such as the Circus Lounge.  The powers at be try their best to keep this buttoned up, but it cannot help but have a profound effect on the neighboring community.  Violence is rampant, not only because the army is training young not-so-educated youths to become killing machines, but because many people in Fayetteville are poor.  Conversely many are filthy rich, and that dichotomy never ceases to amaze me.  There are million dollar homes everywhere, and yet murder is common.  It would seem Fayetteville like most places in America has become a third world country.  No longer is there a middle class.  Medium wage earning jobs are scarce.  The legal and medical professions thrive off of Fort Bragg making a powerful upper class.  The rest are poverty level indigents struggling to stay alive.  I have to see this every day, because I do not have shelter in which to hide each day.  Instead I wake to the sounds of the military practicing their methodology.  Droning low-flying aircraft circle my neighborhood!?  Trains beginning at ten o'clock in the evening carry their freight non-stop until noon when there is a small respite.  It is a rail deluge often of which I speak.  When Fort Bragg is frisky, so is CSX-T.  They must deliver the jet fuel for the world's most ready fighting force.  Yee Haw.  I try to forget it.  I try to ignore it, and yet you cannot.  The defense of our nation is paramount to anything, and yet I did not choose to live near Fort Bragg.  I did not choose for Base Realignment and Closure to choose Fort Bragg to be America's Iraq, but it is.  Every military operation in the world is governed by the Ground Forces Command at Fort Bragg.  We are in it, and yet I do not feel America should be at war at all.  The war mongering propaganda almost has won.  America should lead!   Bomb Paris, and America should lead.  Down a Russian airliner, and America should lead.  I am beginning to change my mind, because the ensuing purgatory is intolerable.  It is like depression.  If we are spending seventy percent of our national budget on defense, then I am beginning to want to put the military to work.  We are spending the same amount whether they are deployed or not.  I am livid my generation inherited Iraq, a destroyed, unwanted, wasteland.  America feels some responsibility for Iraq, because we destroyed her.  Can we really stop the destiny of Pol Pot?  All of these political events carefully are being calculated to affect the United States presidential election next November.  Why can't we reach an agreement, and stand down?  That would mean America would have to leave the Middle East.  We left Viet Nam.  We left Korea.  Still it must be about the oil.  Diligently I try to remember things which have become important to me.  They pale in the face of war and national defense, and yet I am not willing to surrender my humanity.  I would like for us to get on with it.  My childhood was rife with the violence in Viet Nam.  Artists created beauty from it including music, something which no longer matters to the world except as a high dollar commodity.  WE can live with war, because we have been for years.  It has been a closeted war.  It has been a covert war.  It has been a Rumsfeld and Cheney war.  America traditionally has not fared well in such things.  We are more of a "Rah rah" kind of country.  Rally the troops, have some parades, and ship out in grand fashion.  We don't have the money to pay for this, as China idly sits by.  China.