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Documenting history as it happens.

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How Can You Tell

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Written outside on the 4th of July while looking at my yard.  I should have been weeding it, obviously.

Weeds in the garden but I really can’t tell
Everything’s grown over but I think it looks swell
Sure it’s lush and it’s pretty but still I don’t know
Just exactly what made this dirty ground grow

When everything’s flowers whether happy or sad
How can you tell what’s good and what’s bad?

Feeling lousy sometimes is for your own good
Certainly that point could be misunderstood
But explain it to me if you know it so well
How you can tell your heaven from your hell?

When everything’s flowers whether happy or sad
How can you tell what’s good and what’s bad?
It’s not Walden Pond and I sure ain’t Thoreau
So tell me what made this dirty ground grow.

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Jul 5, 2011

Darkened Skies

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Written in restrospect.  Never forget.

I saw a photo once dated 1933
It was taken in secret and was never meant to see
But it’s there plain as day and it’s staring back at me
One dead man on his way to darken up the sky.

I saw a photo once dated 1945
Hundreds of men piled high, no longer alive
I stood at that same spot and unashamed I cried
Finished, they were on their way to darken up the sky.

There aren’t enough photos to see all that they did
Six million dead, and one million of them, kids
Why from them did He keep His face well hid?
Did God see the them on their way to darken up His sky?
God must have seen them on their way to darken up His skies.

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Jun 19, 2011

Reflections on Responsibilities

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For as long as most of us can remember, America has been the world’s superpower, which is both a blessing and a curse.  With rights come responsibilities; specifically, for America, we have a responsibility to remember what has happened, and what could have been.

As the number of American citizens with any memory of WWII declines, so does our ability to understand what America could have become, as that was the last great conflict we undertook.  America now lives in relative peace.  In the aftermath came American supremacy, and over time, a glorification of power, war, and conflict that other nations simply do not have.  This glorification of power, like the responsibility of power, comes with status, I suppose.  Can this relative peace last?  Given the historical fact that empires wax and wane, can our position in the world remain the same?

I ask myself these questions after ten days in Europe; namely, Munich, Germany, and Warsaw, Poland.  I wonder why I experienced what I did, why I saw what I saw, in these two vastly different – yet related – cities.  Munich is the former headquarters of fascism, the Nazi Party; Warsaw is perhaps its greatest casualty.  Things are different for me now, having walked these city streets.

This trip, however, was not my only experience seeing casualties of conflict; here in the States, I have seen the (thankfully) few and far between indications of conflict.  I’ve seen both Ground Zero in New York City and the USS ARIZONA Memorial at Pearl Harbor.  I was an Officer in our Navy and currently work for the Navy.  I’ve been a cog in the wheel of the American war machine.  I’ve been stationed on ships with armament, captured Somali Pirates, and had skirmishes with the Iranian Navy.  I was stationed at the Navy Annex, outside the resting place of many of our military’s casualties, Arlington Cemetery, up the hill from the Pentagon.  I’ve been to all the memorials in DC on a number of occasions, and have visited the Holocaust Museum four times.

But New York, Honolulu, and the DC area are thriving, although there are warning signs this may be coming to an end.  Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, Europe has struggled to rebuild itself.  So it is in Warsaw; Warsaw is what it is because of Munich.  Warsaw, at the end of the day, won my heart, not for what it is, but for what it’s gone through, and for its potential; I’ll write more about Poland in a later post.  Arriving here, I thought I had seen it all already.

But I had never seen the jagged walls of a capital city that were blown apart seventy years ago, with bullet holes still visible in the mortar.  I had never touched the walls of a Ghetto death camp, or walked the streets where women and children were starved, and if they survived, burned to death, in Warsaw. I had never seen prisons where people were held in spaces too small to sit.  I had never walked through gas chambers disguised as showers, or looked into the ovens where people were “liquidated” en masse at the concentration camp site in Dachau.  I’m having some issues dealing with these sensations, because I thought I knew what there was to know about war.  I was wrong.

On the surface, my outlook on foreign policy has not changed.  Deeper, however, something else is going on.  Like most folks, my world-view and my outlook are built upon values, which are built upon assumptions, which have changed since my trip.  As the very foundations of my psyche have shifted, I’ll be reassessing how to deal with current events as I go, as I am still trying to understand what I saw… as if there is any way to understand it.

With war, I’m now convinced, there is no understanding, only coping.  War is more than lines shifting on a map; I knew that.  War is men dying for causes sometimes not understood; that, I knew as well.  I also knew that wars were won by defeating the will of your enemy, often by means outside of the regulations of the Geneva Conventions.  I believed that; I’ve read Sun Tzu and Clausewitz.  I knew how that all works.  I’m not so sure anymore.

War is the bodies of women gunned down in fields while uprooting potatoes.  War is when the women and children left alive from that episode continue to uproot potatoes, making the calculus that they, like their friends, may be shot uprooting potatoes, but if they leave the field, they will “surely starve.”  So they continue with their work, around the dead bodies.  We have a responsibility to remember.

War is children left starving inside of a ghetto wall erected with the express intent of starving children, simply because they were Jewish.  Do not be confused by that.  Facts do not lie, and history should not be manipulated regarding the facts.

What’s more, war is women and children burned to death in the civilian cities that we Americans destroyed, either by conventional (Dresden) or by nuclear means (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).  War ended there, but not without a price.  Again, and more painfully here, we have a responsibility to remember.

This is why we have the Geneva Conventions now, something in the past I’ve differed with.  I’m not so sure anymore.  This may have you wondering if I’m antiwar now:  No.  Not entirely, that is.  I see things differently, though.  I am reassessing everything now; I’ll find out as I go.

So What Now?

We have responsibility to look at our past if we expect to move forward in the future; otherwise, we will fall into the same pitfalls we are trying to escape.  This is my greatest foreign policy fear.

The United States are/is now involved in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and once in Pakistan, which is where we should have been the last half of this decade.  Justification for aiding the conflicts in Libya and Yemen are wobbly.  If Libya, why not Syria?  While I have become more hesitant about conflict since my trip, I have learned we cannot ignore human rights violations.  This not so much redefines, but solidifies my outlook, which does not, and will likely never, conform with partisan platforms.

So let’s talk about human rights, a supposed priority of the American Left.  President Obama was in Warsaw the day before I was.  In remarks made with Prime Minister Donald Tusk, used the spread of democracy throughout Eastern Europe as a model for our ongoing Arab Spring.  There is a fundamental difference between struggles for democracy in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War and the ongoing Arab Spring, and that caveat is freedom.

The President’s remarks last month on the Middle East and North Africa show that democracy is more important than freedom.  This is dangerous.  It’s important to remember that democracy in the Arab World does not amount to freedom in the Arab World.  While democracy may come to the Arab World, the spread of freedom throughout the region will likely not.  If the region were democratic, the world would likely experience it’s Second Holocaust, at a more blinding speed than the first.  As philosopher George Santayana famously stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Our values must therefore be unwavering; our application of them, however, must adapt to the circumstances of the day.  The lesson is, existing models and theories on democracy and freedom cannot be applied in cookie-cutter fashion.  This is further discussed in my post Frenemies ‘R’ Us from February, regarding the revolution in Egypt.  Turns out, Egypt’s revolution has blown up in our face.  The reasons for war must be directly related to clearly articulated values; if not, we have no justification for making war, as we have no perspective on what it means to the families below.

Personally, I will try to be less slanted towards people as collectives; regardless of observations about a certain religious group, I will try to not see all Muslims as of one mind.  Likewise, I will try to not see all Democrats as Leftists.  I will continue to make judgements as I see them, but I hope to encourage more diverse opinions by not jumping to conclusions.

I will also try not to complain so much about hunger, or aching feet, or long bus rides, or the temperature outside, after seeing what I’ve seen.  I have no right to do so.  By checking myself, I hope to remember.

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Jun 11, 2011

The Smell That’s Around You

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“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

In every large city, whether rich or poor, there is always the faint aroma of feces.  It’s always there.  Sometimes your brain and your olfactory lobe work together so you smell it, and sometimes, they don’t.  Think about that.

City smells smell “hot,” even when it it not hot.  The reason is simple enough.  Warm sewer gases waft upwards from beneath the dirty sidewalks and streets, upward to the up-turned nostrils, sending messages to brains that cannot discern whether they are smelling feces, cigarette smoke, automobile exhaust, brake dust, some foreign food cooking, some foreign perfume, or some foreign armpits.  The smell of mustard gas tickles noses that are attached to faces of people with blank stares, shuffling here and there, like they are somehow more important than the guy with the blank stare shuffling next to him.  I am not unaware, I am not too far removed from this phenomenon.

Those faces are attached to the heads of people adorned with silly glasses, silly hats, silly earrings, something, anything to differentiate themselves from everyone – everyone, that is, but the “friends” they shuffle to meet who dress and adorn themselves just like them.  Whether its ironic fedoras, ironic neon shoes, ironic neon glasses, skinny or baggy jeans, skinny or baggy shirts, skinny or baggy suits, or just a plain ol’ hijab, these city-dwellers must be different than you, but must identify with their “friends.”  It’s how they belong, mind you.

Mothers push baby strollers through the muck and the mong on the streets, indiscernible, really, from the feces they smell from below the streets.  All the while, these smells attack the up-turned noses, daring the brains to think what the sources of the smells might be.  And on and on the people march, going nowhere in particular as fast as they can.  Somewhere along they way they will eat some foreign-smelling foods, turn that food into feces, pour it out into an old rusty pipe, to go on and be sniffed and contingently ignored by other city-dwellers.

The power to ignore the smell of feces is what makes people civilized.  When a person can no longer stand the smell of feces and they move out of the city, their friends mourn their decision to leave.  That’s because they have made the decision to lose their civility.  ”Aw,” their friends will say.  ”Too bad,” and, “That’s a shame.”  It takes a lot of civility to pay two-to-ten times more for living quarters that are two-to-ten times filthier than those outside the soulless city.

Civility continues without them, though.  Civility shuffles along with its blank stare, ignoring the surrounding feces and its own putrid, mustard gas smell.

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May 25, 2011

Good News Bees

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When I was a youth I remember visiting my grandparents near Wiergate, Texas, positioned East of the Sam Rayburn Dam and Southwest the Toledo Bend Reservoir.  Some of you know exactly where this is, but most people have no idea what any of that means at all.  Suffice it to say, the setting is purposefully rural and removed from any uncivilized “civilization.”

It was here I got to experience some of the things unavailable “in town.”  As a family, we would venture here to so the brothers could do such things as explore the woods, drive go-karts, shoot skeet, and eat wonderful food that seemed to never end.  It was here that I learned to push outside my comfort zone.  It was here that I actively learned.

As a juvenile (delinquent), during the summers, I learned to help my grandfather in his shop and around the yard, with tasks quickly consuming a full day’s work.  As a married adult, I learned to sit with my grandparents over endless cups of coffee to simply talk, ask questions, and wonder at worlds gone by; consider that my grandfather had his first car at age nine, and two by age thirteen… in Downtown Houston.  Sometimes we would all sit up talking until the wee hours of the morning.  My wife has proven to be the granddaughter my grandparents never had; now it seems they want to talk to her on the phone more than to me.  It’s hard to explain, but for me, this is pure bliss.

I learned many incredible things as a youth at my grandparents.  One was a life lesson wrapped in a bit of Appalachian folklore regarding “Good News Bees.”  If you have any relation to the South, you’ve probably heard this story before.  I remember learning this from my grandmother, whom we all call Mamaw.

It must have been Spring Break, as all the flowering bushes were in full bloom, but in Wiergate, Spring feels like Summer.  Near the bushes, what I thought was a bee swarmed in front of my face.  I retracted, fearing the sting.  Walking behind me, Mamaw said, “Those are Good News Bees!  They won’t hurt you.”  I asked what that meant, and she said, “Good News Bees don’t sting; they just come close to look at you and tell you the ‘Good News.’”  Mamaw is strong, and I knew she didn’t want me to be afraid, but I also knew she wouldn’t lead me astray, so I fully trusted her and let go of my fear.

Turns out, this particular “Bee” is a “Yellowjacket Hover Fly,” which does not sting.  In all actuality, the “Bee” hovers in front of you trying to determine whether your face is a flower, as it is a nectar feeder.  Nevertheless, I learned not to panic, or even try to swat the “Bee,” because it would not hurt me.  Instead, I learned to stop and watch it in its habitat.

For a young boy, this was empowering.  Since Mamaw taught me of the Good News Bee, as an adult, I really don’t fear bees at all.  This is a trait that has haphazardly been passed onto my own son, who loves to watch bees swarm in our yard; bees are the first thing he looks for out the window in the morning.  I find great joy walking outside with my two-year old, without fear, to look at bees swarming the flowers.

I hope that, inherently, my Mamaw’s strength has been passed down to us all.  I also hope now we can all return the favor.  We have recently gotten some Bad News regarding her health, and I hope the story of the Good News Bees can remind us that, in the face of danger, not to panic; instead, we must trust in the Lord, the bearer of Good News, that after this is over, nothing can hurt us anymore.

“But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.’” ~ Luke 2:10

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May 14, 2011

Discovering My Perspective

All of my past posts are archived below. Feel free to comment to any post by clicking the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.

I have no rights to the photos used herein. Most were found online through a simple Google search. If a copyright issue exists, please message me and I will eradicate the problem. Thank you!

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