We're all gonna die

I read the news. Well, I read the news that's put in front of me. There was a Washington Post Article that mentioned soldiers' perspectives on the difference between Baghdad now and Baghdad post-"liberation".

While I'm not one to not provide summaries, today's not going to be an instance. The article led me to believe that there is a good chance that insurgent/Islamist/asshollic-bad-guy groups might possibly be selectively deploying their forces into areas where American forces have recently arrived, and then set them about raising hell.

The citizenry draw a correlation between the arrival of US forces and what our apathetical worldview perceives as general mayhem and sectarian hellish hatefulness. So, America = bad guys. Well, I think we are, but that's for another post that I can't write because I don't have sufficient resource material immediately at hand to STFU those who might disagree.

I will say here and now that we didn't go in wanting to be the bad guys. Don Rumsfeld, Uncle Dick, and your local village's missing idiot (W) botched the ever-living-hell out of what might have been a noble endeavor. Now we're hated, our GI's are viewed as legitimate targets, and we're no safer as a result of our illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. Indeed the ranks of multi-national hate groups perpetrating malfeasance around the globe have only swelled as a result… and, dare I say, with arguably good reason.

I, as always, digress. Those who oppose the American empire and our ever-loving (foolishly perceived) one-size-fits-all freedom and democracy are probably a lot smarter than we think. They’re not all in the fight “because they just don’t know better”. There are doctors and lawyers, mothers and brothers, and your third-grade crush. Their hatred of what we apparently represent is only a few degrees of separation away from home-spun, good ‘ol militia style hatred of some aspects of this country. And that hatred is separated by fewer degrees than we’d like to admit from our founding fathers’ hatred of the crown of their day.

The divide and conquer (slash) politics of fear that have become the standard of American political culture have brought legitimacy to the ideas that your freedom isn’t my freedom, and that your sociopath is my patriot. Life isn’t as simple as it used to be for many a reason, probably mostly because of Al Gore’s internets and the rest of that technological clap-trap. Churchill said, "For with primacy in power is joined an awe-inspiring accountability for the future." Bepimpled, defaultedly chronic masturbators across the world met a simpler version: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Technology is power, and we have yet to even come close to living up to the responsibility.

Of course they hate us. We’re all gonna die.

-S.W. America