I was born just a few months after the fall of Saigon in 1975. It was always regarded in my lifetime as the war that was embarrassing and unspeakable. The list of characters who were involved from LBJ to Nixon and Robert McNamara to General West Moreland are legendary Washingtonians that have since been exposed as knowing in full depth the reality of their decisions and its incongruence with the lies they were publicly espousing each night on the evening news. History has described this as an unnecessary war filled with fog and deceit. Protesters and politicians made careers out of their opposition to this debacle in south east Asia.
So as my life unfolded, it became evident that politicians never wanted to overtly find themselves back in the position that those 1960's guys did. War was frowned upon and both the politician and the press found a way to frame Uncle Sam as the good guy - fighting nobly for peace and democracy around the globe.
I was in high school when the Berlin Wall fell and Saddam invaded Kuwait. America seemed like the world wide hero that was there to protect the little guy.
At least that was the illusion that was being sold.
Slowly and with great craft, this list of has-been people from the Vietnam era were silently finding themselves back in the fold. Presenting a new vision of peace through strength and justifying all the expenditures and war they could muster, done all in the name of preventative global maintenance.
Defense secretaries, secretaries of state, military leaders... all seemed to be reappearing like a bad cancer in the government, and they were all advocating for more war, more defense spending, more intervention abroad and more importantly more power centralized in their hands.
These neocon ideas were first attractive to the right. I remember being a young man and wanting to love the United States. I conflated military involvement as patriotic. The military was the gold standard and so if they needed something, we should give it to them - of course there were stories of 1000$ toilet seats and wasteful, lost billions, but that was a small price to pay for a safe world.
Then one September morning I woke up to planes smashing into buildings.
And the illusion of safety was shattered with the glass that fell 100 stories from the sky.
There were burnt passports on the ground next to jet fuel melted steel - but...we had our bad guys. Now there was a chance to justify the obliteration of entire countries and people in the name of regime change. No one in America, certainly not the average citizen ever had designs of another 20 year war. But strangely we watched as the enemy changed names from BinLaden, and the Taliban to Isis, to Isil, back to Isis, and then to Saddam for his encore call. And all the while, the machine got more expensive, the powers at the top got happier and the time got embarrassingly longer.
We were told this war life was the way to a free and beautiful future. Spreading democracy at the point of a gun. A Republican President flew onto an aircraft carrier and pronounced victory. Then there was A Highly enlightened and sophisticated Democrat president with a "perfect crease in his slacks" who let us know during the election that he had a grand plan to stop the wars - and yet when it was all over, we left ruins of rubble in a far off land the same way we left Saigon; blazing out with children falling from airplane wheels and billions of dollars of equipment sitting on the tarmac for the taking.
A strange thing has happened on the way to building this empire. The people of this country have had a great price extracted from them by the leading class. The cost has come not just in the trillions of dollars that we never had in our government accounts, spent on wars we never should have found ourselves in, but it has decimated the lives of military men and women that were lost, or forever scarred. It has come in the form of inflation that results from an out of control government that ruins the social fabric and the home by spending money not on its people but on foreign entanglements to pad the bottom lines of their donors. It makes people feel like their work is worthless and their days are tenuous so that any break down of a car, or a furnace or the latest grocery bill means the choice between rent or medicine, or education for a child.
And all the while, they kept us pointing at each other. They made us believe that it was the divisions in the democracy that was the problem.
It was the damn Democrats or the Rascally Republicans.
And depending on what talking head or newspaper we preferred - we could join up with our favorite sports team and bash our fellow Americans simply because they wore a different colored political jersey.
In the cloakrooms and backrooms of Washington, the elite laughed. War was now supported by both parties, and the cigar smoking sinister swamp creatures could march their most controversial talking heads out to the television or the social media feed and ask them to point fingers and scream at their drinking buddies across the aisle in some sort of grand theater of the strange.
Nothing in this Washington created America was real - except for the beleaguered American.
Watching all of this unfold as I’ve lived , I realized that the political class has figured out how to fight their own pseudo Vietnam style war with its own people. Politics in the modern era requires that all parties stay permanently conquering the political landscapes. Just as it was in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq - ground would be won, then days later abandoned. Lives and destruction were left in the wake but someone could pronounce a victory and our attention spans would enable us to move on from reality and forget that it ever happened.
Much of this is on us as citizens.
There’s a vigilance and education that a Republic requires.
And most of us simply haven’t wanted to put in the energy. We’ve comfortably lived, hoping our only duty was to vote and then hope that they would do the work for us.
I have a a great deal of regret about many moments of my own lack of participation in it.
We should have seen that oft repeated pattern by those in power. We should have heeded Eisenhower and Kennedys' warnings about the military, industrial complex and the secret societies that were being crafted right under our noses. The powerful kept us busy working for food and ever diminishingly valued dollars - and they gained the positions, money and status they craved. We let the empire be overrun by the money mongers and powerful and they told us we should blame each other for it.
So now we stand here, pockets empty and our anger and division ever higher. The names in Washington are the same ones that were there when I first started voting 30 years ago. No one ever leaves. If they are replaced for convenience and expediency, they are strategically supplanted by a more horrific sycophant. The wars go on...the money keeps getting spent...the surveillance of our lives and our actions and our speech is heightened. There's no reservation by the criminals at the top to send the IRS after the small business person - and look the other way from the billionaires and well connected. They will clamp down on ideas by the average American and silence any dissent to their edicts and actions.
This all needs to end - but it must end with the alliance of the disaffected. The alliance of the American people. the alliance of everyone who wants to end the abuse.
The cautionary tale from history however is that it cannot simply be overthrown and replaced by a darker force. Instead, it must be replaced with something stable and right revisiting and insisting on the natural laws of humanity.
There are candidates for president and congress who advocate for this path, but They are being silenced and laughed at - and the circus act of the other candidates that the power brokers love is vehemently promoted because it keeps the agitation up amongst us.
Make no mistake, this isn't advocating for some indifferently weak middle ground.
America needs people who have principles that align with the idea of natural rights. We need people who can assess things with wisdom and lead a populace to a reasonable compromise. Each wing of the base has advocated that being right is the only path forward.
The results are in and we're destroying the future for our children and loved ones at the insistence that we are the wisest and most correct.
There are good voices who listen to others. Robert Kennedy Jr., Rand Paul, Thomas Massie and others who know what's being done to the good people of this country. They are the ones who know where they stand and what they stand for that is best for the people. Those voices are the ones we should be actively advocating for. Democracy is the best of the worst solutions for self government. But if we are going to do this...we need to find the best people we can who can advocate from the position of first principles.
But also… and this is the part we’re most lacking in society, we have to join in with those leaders and listen to our neighbors. We have to do that even when they put a sign up we disagree with.
Loving our neighbors as ourselves requires that we stand up for their right to be wrong, and my right to change my mind or persuade them to change theirs. We have to Quit fighting for hills with no names and Stand shoulder to shoulder with our fellow citizens. The results will have impacts for generations. We as Americans are endowed with the right to restore the freedoms that we have lost from the corporate conglomerate enterprise that we call the government.
