Reflections on War

Memories of War

Remember the Veterans. No, remember the cost of war and that the Veterans are one. Of course, by the time the Man in the White House finishes privatizing the VA, there will be no cost because you'll probably have to pay for everything.

My first experience with this day and its cost, came young. I guess you could say my family's experience with wars in this bright and shiny new country that was going to do fantastic things so very differently from the Kings and Queens of Europe was the Civil War or as I was taught in the South, the War of Attrition. I don't know which is more amazing, that the powers that be actually convinced the people and future generation it was a war of two noble sides, one fighting to free the slaves (notice they never say PEOPLE from slavery) and the other fighting to preserve a noble way of life full of happy workers (that just happened to be property) and cotillions or that a 4 year old child knew the meaning of Attrition.

Just so you fully understand the brain washing that comes with this heritage allow me to show you the two sides or rather what each is taught. Every Sunday after dinner the dining room table, which is the size of a small car, is cleared and the toy soldiers come out. These are not some plastic replicas advertised on a cereal box for a dollar, these are hand carved images of the real men who fought with special care given to the uniforms, medals and appearance of your family's veterans. Oddly, all the Northern soldiers look like faceless blobs. Then for the next few hours of increasingly drunken strategy the prominent battles are refought by little pieces of wood, strategy analyzed and revised by a group of men that will never see a battle field and probably faint at the sight of blood. It is called the War of Attrition for a reason. Wikipedia defines War by Attrition as “Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel. The war will usually be won by the side with greater such resources.” The South considered themselves to be the superior military force that lost only because the North had greater numbers and resources. It was a miracle that our brave and intelligent men won a single battle but they managed to hold out for four glorious years dreaming of those Southern Belles and home and the glory of the Southern way of life, a way of life marked by manners, everyone knowing their place and of course, those fantastic ball gowns stitched and beaded by hand by slaves and those glorious dinners grown and cooked by slaves because those Southern Belles never touched raw food, cleaned anything or did anything. It was a heritage stolen by my wife of a carpetbagger grandmother from her lesbian lover who actually owned the small plantation they lived on as soon as they murdered both husbands in unfortunate farming accidents a week apart. Are you beginning to see the cracks in that story of the Southern Belle, yet? I guess those men did just before one them cracked their skulls.

The story of my mother's side was a different one. No it wasn't a noble group of people fighting to free the slaves (remember, those slaves wouldn't really be considered people until modern times), it was one of a family torn apart and never patched back together as one son went off to join the North and the other the South. Most people do not realize this is why there is Virginia and west Virginia or even Tennessee and Kentucky. Kentucky was part of Virginia, all of which were part of a territory. Kentucky declared its neutrality in the Civil War whereas Tennessee joined the Confederacy. An attack on Kentucky by the Confederacy caused them to join the North. Tennessee was part of North Carolina. Why all the splits? Someone wanted all the states to be equal in size which is why Pennsylvania and Ohio are two states now. Seems I just heard that same illogic in a meeting to annex all property into cities in Broward County. Things never change. People do not realize this is the story of the Northern Veterans, families torn apart by those evil Southerners stating this unnecessary war.

Yes, the Civil War was as much a farce as the shame of my father descended from a Carpetbagger being derided for marrying a Yankee who actually had an uncle who fought for the South. This is when I yell, “Lies, all lies” and the Man in the White House counters with “Alternative Facts”.

So now that we know the Civil War was all about slavery, let's have a few facts.

a. .1% of the men in the south owned more than 100 slaves. Yes there is a decimal point before the 1.

b. 6.6% of the men owned 10-99 slaves.

c. 17.2% owned 1-9 slaves.  

d. 76.1% owned no slaves.

And boom went the myth. The South was a land dominated by mega-factory farms producing cotton with 6.7% of the population having all the wealth and .1% at the very top running things. From Lumen Learning's course on American History: “The South prospered, but its wealth was very unequally distributed. Upward social mobility did not exist for the millions of slaves who produced a good portion of the nation’s wealth, while poor southern whites envisioned a day when they might rise enough in the world to own slaves of their own. Because of the cotton boom, there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River Valley by 1860 than anywhere else in the United States. However, in that same year, only 3 percent of whites owned more than fifty slaves, and two-thirds of white households in the South did not own any slaves at all. Distribution of wealth in the South became less democratic over time; fewer whites owned slaves in 1860 than in 1840.”

Gee, where have I heard that, “poor southern whites envisioned a day when they might rise enough in the world to own slaves.” Oh, right LBJ's explanation of why the poor vote for the wealthy.

“Although a small white elite owned the vast majority of slaves in the South, and most other whites could only aspire to slaveholders’ wealth and status, slavery shaped the social life of all white southerners in profound ways. Southern culture valued a behavioral code in which men’s honor, based on the domination of others and the protection of southern white womanhood, stood as the highest good. Slavery also decreased class tensions, binding whites together on the basis of race despite their inequalities of wealth. Several defenses of slavery were prevalent in the antebellum era, including Calhoun’s argument that the South’s “concurrent majority” could overrule federal legislation deemed hostile to southern interests; the notion that slaveholders’ care of their chattel made slaves better off than wage workers in the North; and the profoundly racist ideas underlying polygenism. “

You might want to read that summary from Lumen several times to let it sink in because it is integral to creation of veterans.

The Northern landscape was dotted with Factory Towns and the reason why the North was actually more prosperous than the South. The south had converted their food producing farms to cotton producing to make Mo' Money with food production being just what they needed to feed the slaves and themselves. The Northern factory towns had a better idea creating a more balanced economy. The factory worker, a “free” man worked for a salary that he then used to buy his food, clothing, medical care and housing from the factory owner. It is most convenient to convince your slave he is free and then charge him to be your slave because he is inferior to you but allow him to think, he might one day own a factory full of workers. But, you had better do it before you became old or disabled and couldn't work because then you were escorted off the factory property to fend for yourself. Whoa, wasn't that the same thing as what the Southern upper class was doing to the lower class white men?

Believe me, the similarities are just coincidence but not lost on the .1% of the Southerners that owns practically all the slaves and land because the factory town was a financially more profitable system than the direct loss from feeding, housing, clothing and providing some medical care for a slave without the bonus of being able to kick him out the door when he became disabled or old and couldn't work any more.

So what was the real fight? Tariffs, and that is a word you will find over and over before every single war after that one. The Northern factories processed cotton into fabric. The South could ship the cotton to England and France, have it processed into fabric and shipped back cheaper than sending it to a Northern factory and all these new millionaires were all about Mo' Money. So the North imposed tariffs that made making it in the USA a better deal than sending it overseas and cut into the Southern profit and the South argued through Calhoun, “ a leading political theorist defending slavery and the rights of the South, which he saw as containing an increasingly embattled minority. He advanced the idea of a concurrent majority, a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority. “

And he based his argument on the Founding Father establishing the Electoral College and the US as a Republic and not a true Democracy. Does THAT sound familiar?

The next big Veteran maker was WWI, started by a lie called the “Em's Telegram”. According the great god Google, “A French diplomat asked William and Bismarck to support his country's wish that a Hohenzollern would never become a Spanish king. William rejected this request and Bismarck, after editing the French diplomat's statement, made it public in the Telegram. France declared war on Prussia on Jult 19, 1870. “

That sounds a lot like today, but it makes more sense once you know the Arms Merchants part in fanning the flames and creating a World War out of this molehill. My relatives came home from WWI with the thousand yard stare as in that war every dirty form of warfare created was seen and we cannot imagine the horrors they saw but the reason the US entered WWI was “The United States entered the war because of the Germans' decision to resume the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the so-called "Zimmerman telegram," intercepted by the British, in which Germany floated the idea of an alliance with Mexico. “

Germany was sinking merchant and passenger ships alike whether they were from a country involved in the war or not. Of course, my relatives actually died for the right of the 1% to enjoy cruises in Europe and buy expensive items from France and Spain to decorate their houses because no one in my family could afford either one.

The next big Veteran creator was WWII. Interestingly enough, the word tariff once again arises from the ashes. The US, England and Europe decided to punish Germany for WWI by placing huge tariffs on anything German, bankrupting them. This allowed a paperhanger to incite the upper class of Germany into electing him and returning their former glory to their society. Didn't I just write that about the Civil War? Now the upper class in the US was not for spanking Hitler for his transgressions because they and the upper class of Germany were good friends and relatives. It wasn't until he attacked England and France, those bastions of royalty, I mean society that all poor white men aspire to rejoin, that something had to be done and so a lot of veterans were created in Hawaii to get us into a war by our illustrious leaders and a Emperor in Japan fighting to maintain the way of life and society of his very civilized and socially structured society with a rich and ruling 1% that everyone else worshiped as gods. Didn't I just write that????

Lather, rinse and repeat and no one ever stops creating veterans, over and over and over again, Johnny goes marching off to war to protect something he isn't a part of and never will be. Johnny needs to wake up and refuse to fight the 1%'s wars. Perhaps when the 1% get finished kicking Johnny in the teeth and he figures out he is never getting any of that wealth or respect, he will but will he be too damaged to do anything about the little Johnnies growing up believing the same old tale?

You tell me.

My father tried to enlist in one of the many wars. He was a pilot and a mechanic. That got him in, but they discovered he had asthma so to get rid of him, they shipped him to Tampa Florida. Between the humidity and the mold, he could not breathe, so he was given a choice by the US government. He could resign and claim no benefits or he could die in Tampa. He had a young wife, I wasn't born yet, and he had a short life expectancy with asthma, anyway. When he lost consciousness, the other men in the ward pooled their money and called my mother in Pennsylvania where she was staying with her sister. The only reason they had a phone was my uncle was a union man and had a good job in the steel mill. Scared to death, having never left the small area of West Virginia and Pennsylvania where her family was, she borrowed money from my uncle, boarded a train and road all the way to Florida to the VA hospital which was a converted hotel that had been abandoned for years. The men half carried my father to the train station claiming he was drunk to get him on the train because they wouldn't transport the sick. The conductor took pity on my mother because she was young and pretty and didn't throw them off the train in Georgia when he discovered my father wasn't drunk. They spent the next years in poverty although they both made a good living, her a secretary and him a mechanic, paying for his medical bills. Through a strange miracle, he was cured and they moved to North Carolina to escape the federal records that prevented him from getting a pilot's license. He steadfastly stood by his country and refused to sue them to get his earned benefits until he became a mercenary in the Latin American theater and discovered just who and what his government was, a government for and by the wealthy and he was nothing more than cannon fodder. That was when he sued the US and won. He spent the end of his life in the VA hospital being treated for ailments mostly caused by that little side trip to Tampa. Tampa no longer is the Hellhole he was in. It is drained, air conditioned and a lovely place. The ex-VA hospital is a gorgeous hotel. I've stayed there. It's haunted by mostly the ghosts of all the Veterans who died there. The basement houses gift shops and is really haunted because that is where they piled the hopeless ones and let them die. That is where my mother found my father, in a bed that hadn't been changed in week, with no food or water, gasping for breath and dying in his uniform. They didn't even bother giving them a hospital gown, so the guys had no trouble faking the guards out and carrying him to the train station.

Oh yes, honor our veterans but never forget who makes them and how they treat them before you vote or sign into the military.

I found my father in a bed in the VA having had his leg amputated against his wishes in a room with 5 other veterans, 2 were psychiatric cases, one violent, and the other two were heart patients trying to stay calm and not have another heart attack. It was bedlam with screaming and throwing things, one trying to strangle the other one for throwing feces at him, while my father begged me to kill him.

Yes, let's never forget our veterans and how the rich, who buy their kids out of military service, treat them the 364 and a half days that aren't spent in the stands at an 11/11 parade.

NEVER FORGET.