Charlie Part 3

( This is Part Three of three-part essay)

Though I really hadn't formed opinions at that time and was aware of the standoff between Soviet Union and America over missiles in Cuba and knew a little about the bay of pigs and segregation, all of that, but, suddenly with that one remark, I had my eyes opened to a big difference of opinion. America was/ is a divided nation. The only thing I didn't know and wouldn't ever know is what was the reason that tech sergeant, who probably wasn't the only one, said that. Was it the Cuban missile crisis, the Catholicism, the bay of pigs, the racism? How many things can form a persons opinion about things as important as those things were?

Much later, well after Lee Harvey Oswald was himself assassinated (if that's the right word for it), making sure some things would ever be known, I read that the CIA (at Kennedy order, I assume) many attempts had been made on Fidel Castro's life and perhaps, retaliation could be added to the list.

By the time I was discharged ( honorably, by the way), I was no longer invested in the notion that the nation that at one time I would have died for (though to be honest, I didn't get close to combat, I was involved in pure Cold War-nuclear operations and planning, ironically ending my service just days after Israeli "victory" of the Six Day War), I no longer was a patriot.

It would be just a little over a year after my discharge, the assassinations and Americas troubles began in earnest, at least, as far as i was concerned. MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, many Black Panthers, Kent State, Jackson State, the bombing (both here and abroad).

The division continued. A president was reelected even after his attempts at organizing a secret intelligence operation out of the White House. Even after, his Secretary of State, who would throughout the rest of his life be lauded as a distinguished statesman, secretly bombed Cambodia, Laos relentlessly without any declaration of war.

We've seen these things before. And yet, today, to young people it must all seem new and maybe even unimaginable because in our sterile education system and relentless assault on real freedom of speech, Americas story or history has encompassed a complete lack of real narration and discussion about history itself. It's a difference between generations schooled in the art of social manipulation, a schooling without freedom of speech. That happened before Trump begins to whitewash freedom even more.

So, when children are massacred in their classrooms, when a foreign or domestic entity establishes itself as the superior moral behavioral guide, when presidents and congresses and courts no longer believe in the very system of institutions upon which they were built, when preachers, celebrity demagogues, and billionaires command, then assassins will come and sort out what should be left out, and like Charlie Kirk says, and I'll paraphrase, it's better to have a few deaths to see who's really serious about protecting our human rights.

In America, dying for your country is big talk, though much of it comes from people who never have taken the opportunity to fight or make sacrifices for their beliefs. I think we can call those people fakes, can't we?

Charlie Kirk died for his ideals and the assassin will probably die for his, whatever they are. What does it matter? Nowhere in there is an answer to anything. If a president can be killed and sixty years later, we still don't know why or even care because he was either a son of a bitch or the promised "savior" of his country, yet everything is the same. The fact he had kids and an intelligent wife, who would remarry and carry that moment in Dallas with her to her grave, just means, "life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone." (john mellancamp).

All I can say is, especially to those who sanctify and those who gleeful be, remember where you are right now and make a note for the future when it dawns on you one day to ask yourself, how did you help to bring the world to its knees.

Now what?

Sent from my iPad