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As a veteran, I weep for my country. Well, not really for my country as much as for my failing to protect it. When I enlisted in 1977, the cold war was blooming, Carter was in, the nightmares of Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon, gasoline shortages, were ended.
I was raised in coal country in SW Pennsylvania. Japanese steel imports were eating our lunches and it didn't make sense to work in a mill or a mine. I didn't have money for school and wasn't very scholarly, but had an aptitude for electronics so the Navy seemed a good option. Besides there were commies to guard against.
Through a delayed enlistment, on my 17th birthday I swore the oath that many have sworn. These days, I've noticed there wasn't an expiration date with it.
I was not a political teen at all. That continued during my stay in the navy and on into my late 30's.
I was on the sub base in Groton Ct. when the US embassy was seized in Iran. There was an Iranian barracks on the base as the Shah was purchasing old boats from us. The Marines started babysitting them. Somewhere along the line, poppy Bush did his thing in Iran and RayGun got elected, and I had progressed through training and rode a deep ocean survey ship.
With RayGun, the nature of service changed. Drug testing, much more authoritarian rule, and eventually I left and got a real job.
This is rambling a bit, but my main point is While all the crap that was leading up to our current situation was happening, I didn't recognize the threat! I was too busy trying to make ends meet and have some fun. Iran-Contra should have woken me, It didn't. I barely noticed it.
I got married, had kids, watched football on Sundays and lived the American Dream. There was that little thing over in Kuwait, an aside, I didn't know then that Rumsfeld had talked to Saddam before the invasion to imply it was ok, but hey, we just threw them out, it was just, right?
Then Clinton was the man and I watched the tech industry rise and the internet and all that rise from the inside. Then those jobs being offshored with tax breaks to do it and well, it smelled a little funny, but hey, that's the way things go. I hired a guy to work on a house addition who came back from Iraq one sterile. We agreed about how fucked up the government was. Still, I wonder, where was it obvious the constitution was under attack? Still, I feel I should have known, there is something I didn't do that got us here.
Somewhere in there the FCC abandoned the fairness doctrine, the media got consolidated and I didn't even really notice. Funny how looking back, shit creeps up on you. Man, that should have gotten my attention, but, alas, it didn't. In hindsight that was a clear threat to my beloved constitution.
Then came the whirlwind we've seen since 2000. The supremes declared W the victor and I shrugged thinking "How bad can it get? We've survived idiots before." You guys know the rest of that, and how we were ignored complaining about the Patriot Act, Iraq would be a bad place to send troops, etc.
Still, as a vet, I'm left today feeling that there should have been something that I could have done to change this, to actually effectively defend my country from itself, and that feeling, my friends, is wholly unsatisfactory.
That feeling is slightly better than the doubt I will have the opportunity to help fix this and reclaim our constitution before the shooting starts. Right now Kucinich is my only hope, so with an apology that I didn't see the threat, I'll see you on the barricades, Brothers.
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