The Best I Got Left.
1 March 2022
Unclean
It was 2002. I was a 32 yr old Captain. The President wanted to go to war. I wanted to go to war. The media went on a tear like we're seeing right now. "You're with us or with THEM!" We said. We said it constantly, we heard it without end, and we never questioned the authorities on whose behalf we were to fight.
We were wrong. Not because we fought, but because we forgot to question the answers that were given to us. Many of us have looked back and were not surprised at the lies, now plainly exposed, that were fed to us. We knew in our hearts that the justification was a little sketchy. It didn't matter, back then. We wanted to fight.
We were wrong. I was wrong.
My mistakes make up the majority of the fund of knowledge that I offer to those who are young. In the case of mass corporate media driving madness toward war, don't listen to them. That was our failure. That was my failure. Good men died because of me.
We failed in the first act, that of independent thought. Largely because of that lack, our efforts were doomed from that very point forward. Lies are nothing but attempts to misshape the world around us into something other than reality. Reality inevitably snaps back and shows us to be fools. Anything built upon that lie falls without foundation.
Well, twenty years have passed and the exact same people who drummed up the war then are at it again now. They are, again, trying to misshape the world into something other than reality. Anything that is based upon that will fall just as utterly. Good men will die as a result.
Don't lie to yourself, and don't let somebody convince you of following them when they are busy misshaping the world. Ask the questions. Question the answers. Keep questioning until your heart is satisfied. Anything less than that is failure.
I'm rather past the halfway point of the four-score that I hope to be allotted. I pray that the Lord will allow me to atone by destroying an enemy worthy of a good death, but I'm old enough to know that He rarely goes in for that sort of plain symmetry, nor do I fear that I am worthy of such an opportunity at redemption.
What is left, then, is to teach. To observe and instruct about reality as it is, not as I wish it were. That is truth. It's about the best that I have left.
Don't let my mistake, all those years ago, be forgotten.
Learn from it.
