What Will We Do Now?

 Live and Learn.  The FlightAware website is an indispensable information gathering location on the World Wide Web.  There are a handful of active real-time flight tracking websites.  Who knew such a thing existed?  Understanding that "Them Internets" were created by the Department of Defense linking scholarly mostly academic data bases together when developing the nuclear bomb should clarify our cyber experience.  Today we shop on eBay and Amazon, gets our jollies on Facebook, post digital photographs on Instagram, and in the case of past president Donald Trump post inciting often fallacious rhetoric on Twitter sparking an impotent but still dangerous coup attempt in our nation's Capital.  I am not making light of the siege on Washington, but defined by sheer nature it was not a successful coup.  We don't believe it was meant to be.  Instead it was more akin to a rock gone wild.  Too many drugs and too much liquor and that was needed was a spark provided by Trump.  We should not underestimate the former President.  He is a savvy but ruthless businessman with no moral scruples.  President Obama in his recently published book described former Speaker of the House Mitch McConnell as having no moral conscience.  Having no moral conscience means you are not capable of feeling remorse, compassion, empathy, or love for your fellow man.  Instead you are a complete narcissist as is Donald Trump.  I can't imagine such an existence, seeing as love is the only thing that makes life worthwhile.  It is a spiritual fulfillment that far usurps any physical pleasure gained without it.  It is the emotional spark that fuels the heart and eventually the spirit and mind.  What we do on the internet today has become trite.  Social media has all but ruined our sense of reality, our ability to relate to others on a human level, and our ability to survive our environment.  When real tangible problems present themselves such as Covid 19, it has taken the world a year to even begin to mitigate its harm.  Our country, the greatest and most powerful nation in the world, couldn't succeed at the simple task of getting its citizens simply to wear masks.  Instead, like everything today, it has become an extended media debacle.  Ratings.  It would seem America needs these real life scenarios, meager attempts at experiencing and learning from what once was taught in school.  Whether it be Aesop's Fables, the Bible, or simple history literature like science has been demeaned to a level never before.  This is why television and film are so devoid of content.  Life must come from somewhere, and in America once it came from the population.  We had established a working model for life, and it was fruitful, fulfilling, and interesting.  Our folk culture was a large part of this life, and very few of these now seeming trite habits have endured the test of the 21st century.  It would seem the dire predictions of 2012 didn't unfold until 2020.  We are living it now, and like war seems not to be able to correct itself.  Will we ever return to normal American life?  We have been living in the trenches for a year, and like Korea and Viet Nam these experiences will remain in our souls.  You don't get rid of them.  You learn to live with them.  I never knew how many aircraft were flying in the air at any given time, until I began to peruse the Flight Aware website.  With great interest I have begun keeping track of air traffic above Cumberland County.  It is amazing how many private pilots there are and how diverse the ownership is of these small commuter planes is.  Whether is is Sanderson Farms, Eye in the Sky, or other miscellaneous unregistered planes hard at work doing whatever it is they do, air traffic is intense in Fayetteville.  There are flight schools.  There is aircraft maintenance.  There are defense contractors, and there are planes belonging to the United States Army.  These planes seem of most interest, because we as civilians have no idea what role they fulfill.  It doesn't take much time to find these aircraft online, but as are most things in the DoD they are classified.  Rest assured one thing for which we are in store is the massive return of our military from Afghanistan.  No one pays much attention, but the majority of munitions from America leave from the deep water port Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.  This is in North Carolina.  Heavy equipment is hauled here on freight trains from all over the country to Leland, where it is sorted and picked up by military locomotives and pulled into this expansive port facility.  There are three huge docks capable of hosting large freighters which are commercially contracted.  Trains pull the munitions and equipment onto the docks and cranes load them into the ship.  I am sure this process has begun, and let's hope that we don't abandon this process mid stream and decide to leave our gear in Afghanistan.  All ready we have made this mistake single handedly creating an infrastructure for ISIL or ISIS.  They commandeered our left over military equipment, re-purposed it, and used it against the rest of the world.  We should make no mistake in Afghanistan.  Whether or not the consequences of our departure will rival the ascension of the regime of Pol Pot in Viet Nam cannot be considered.  As President Biden asserts, we need to get out.  Hauling your gear back from the Middle East cannot seems as glamorous as deploying to kick some towel head ass, but a kinder gentler time is needed for America.  I am positive Lindsey Graham all ready has another skirmish in the works to tweak our sense of domestic security.  If we do stop fighting, then the challenge becomes, "What do we do?"