All Are Wounded by War

So I saw this article in the news talking about how the Wounded Warriors Project charity that works for injured U.S. military personnel and veterans is under scrutiny for alleged financial oopsie-daisies like lavish parties and so on. In other words, they were using the donations for a bit more than wounded warriors. But my question is this: Why is this any different than anything else along these lines? Humor me for a moment here.

How is this different than Veteran’s Day Sales and Memorial Day Sales? Think about it for a minute. Better yet, let’s have some truth in advertising: “Come celebrate the deaths of millions of human beings and the use of two nuclear weapons with Tiny Tot Toy Store’s Memorial Day Sale! We have great plush Enola Gay stuffed B-29 bombers, perfect for infants! And the Peter Panzer electric tank for kids—seats two! Don’t miss out! Ten percent veteran’s discount!” The thing is, you could do that and Americans would love it. You could even have a restaurant name itself “Hiroshima Nuclear Barbeque” and people would pack that place to the gills every night.

Since when has America gotten squeamish about making a buck off of war? Because this charity supposedly did it? Come on, politicians use veterans to get elected and no one blinks an eye. They sell more wars by holding up the dead from previous wars as reasons to create more dead people. They call it “defending freedom” and crap like that. Why not call it what it is? Killing people. What’s so hard about that truth? We need to go over to some country unable to defend itself and kill people there. We’ll lose a bunch of people, too, and more will come home wounded in body, mind, and soul. But people will make money! What? Why can’t we make money off of peaceful pursuits? Because you can’t make movies about combine drivers, or dairy farmers, or spice merchants. Well, not movies that sell.

Why now the outrage over someone possibly making a buck off of the suffering left as a legacy from another futile American war? Gosh, anyone remembered the WOUNDED CIVILIANS we left behind in the wake of our foreign policy disasters? The widows and orphans? The maimed and blinded, the mines over in other countries still killing kids decades later, the scarred and impoverished? Yeah, where’s the outrage about that? Where’s the outrage over the government that CREATED those wounded warriors for no reason other than their own flippin’ egos?!

Right, no one notices that we have an entire economic sector devoted to making money off of state-sponsored murder. Oh, right, we call that “national defense”. They have staff meetings in these places where they discuss the kill ratio of a weapon like it’s a lawnmower. “Well, it can mow them down a lot faster because we added tungsten cubes with hardened steel spikes embedded into them. Tests on tethered goats looked like someone sprayed the ground with hamburger…” And they talk like this about human beings that have not done any harm to us. We’re outraged because of a charity that might have mismanaged some money? Excuse me, but we have the entire government mismanaging our money towards murdering innocent people. And dare we protest that and try to refuse to pay those taxes, we’re jailed.

They call it patriotism, by which we justify the killing of innocent people we don’t even see or know. Then those we sent to do it come home and we think some tin can for donations at the local convenience store will make it all better. No one comes to the SOURCE that CREATES these wounded warriors: The government. Let some high school try to deny access to military recruiters or even have a teacher advise not enlisting. They’ll label that entire school a hotbed of weak-willed terrorist sympathizers (because the Soviets are gone and we can’t label them all as communist sympathizers now.) Then when people come home minus legs or arms from those wars, we act like it was “the enemy” that did it to them. No. It was OUR government that sent them into a situation where the native population of another country defended their country. That’s what we’re not seeing. Those people are defending their country against an invader. Gosh, we never see ourselves that way, do we? As invaders. As the enemy. But that’s what we are.

It’s not because other countries “hate freedom”. It’s because they hate being invaded. It’s because they hate troops breaking down their doors in the middle of the night and carting off their sons to jail. It’s because they hate the hospitals and wedding parties bombed by “accident”—accidents that wouldn’t happen if we were not there in the first place. Let’s put the wounded warriors in perspective here. Everyone is wounded by war. All of us. Let us now begin to understand that.

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