Veterans

 TRUMP & ANTISOCIALIZATION THEORY:

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

 TRUMP & ANTISOCIALIZATION THEORY:

 

War is Coming

 

I’m a little burned about it, just as I figure out this antisocialization business, along comes TrumPutin to make it completely fucking obvious to anyone with a TV or a phone, but just in case it still isn’t . . . maybe I am the first and only one to see what it is a monster like Trump intuits so well: abuse makes shit happen. Mock my words, the abuse and the criminal legislation this administration are dishing out only leads one direction, to war. All I see all day long on Twitter, is “why, why, why?” and “it makes no sense,” but I’m here to tell you folks.

It makes sense, in fact, it makes perfect sense.

Not “good” sense, I mean in the moral sense, in the positive sense of “good,” but it makes perfect “bad” sense. People don’t see bad sense, we don’t want to or something, but the logic is clear when you do.

There is a single theme, a single result that is behind everything this administration does, and it is not life, liberals. “Why, why, why?” is death, death, death. What else is common behind these things – healthcare repeal, the potato famine response to Puerto Rico, the talk of war in the Pacific, and then the tax reductions that again bring healthcare negligence? Antisocialization theory says that when a randomly violent alpha male says, “tremendous number of deaths,” we should believe he picked his adjective according to his heart. These are big, easy examples, but look at everything: still calling to execute the Central Park Five AFTER their exoneration – class?

Theme?

OK, I won’t press. As to why, why, why would that be a goal for anyone, in concrete terms, I can’t imagine. I think I have some ideas about the roots of this sort of thing, but why this, now, I don’t know. Guesses include the New World Order conspiracy theory, that our overlords have determined that for life to be sustainable in a good way in this planet, most of us have to die. Alternatively, maybe Trump really is Putin’s mindless, blind weapon to destroy the West that has betrayed Russia so many times. So, I’m not sure, directed, conscious death from the illuminati, or blind, mindless death from the place where Trump’s mind would have been were he fully human, or something else almost certainly, because why would I know? – but follow the signs, see what direction makes sense of it all. Death, death, death. It’s the only common denominator.

Maybe to let “all politicians” off the hook, because like HST, I’d trade these ones in for Nixon in a second, because I’m not saying all the Republicans or all the politicians are death cultists, I’ll share some speculation, my theory that repealing healthcare began as an opposition talking point and never would have been policy if life had not somehow conspired to install Nazis in the White House who pounced on it opportunistically. Negative forces were in play before this, but in hindsight, there was something like balance. I mean, compared to this. It was such an opportunity for deaths!

Tremendous opportunity!

When the head of an organization is an abuser, it’s horrible to work there and everyone becomes irritable. Stress hurts and causes an increase in the stress and pain we in turn dish out when we break down – that is my “antisocialization theory,” a slight re-wording of Sapolsky’s revelations about stress. He said that pain and fear cause stress that hurts our health and that deflecting it and passing it on makes us feel better, and measurably so. It means a horrible simple thing, that abuse makes us abusers, that all anyone need do to make us worse is treat us bad, it’s the simplest, most depressing technology we have. Treat us poorly enough and we will go to war.

This is what it means when we perceive that “the system was here before Trump,” not the existing Republican Party, but the existing human being and all of our institutions. Trump, just like every warlord and fascist and mass murderer before him is the occasional frontal-lobe deficient monster who understands this in the wrong way, as a lever to use, rather than the way the rest of us see it, as exactly what NOT doing is what defines us as being human. Liberals in the broadest sense, meaning civilized, modern people, even conservatives from a decade or two back, live to mitigate our basest urges – but not this administration.

If you still think this is more of the same, if you can’t see the sense in this administration’s activities, the consistency in all that they say and do, try this on – does it promote death? Need more examples?

NRA/gun laws (OK, not new, but already consistent)

Climate change shirking, Paris Agreement

Abortion/BC (not new, but like healthcare, rhetoric now become reality)

 

OK, enough for one sitting. Resist!

 

Jeff,

Nov. 17th., 2017

A conflicted Society – When it’s your Job to Die

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This was last year’s Remembrance Day post, here it is with only the tiniest of edits, but I thought it was worth repeating, maybe we’ll find something else that needs to be said too.

Jeff

Remembrance Day in Canada, Veteran’s Day in the States, it brings a lot of talk, mostly all patriotic, and when it drifts into some controversial, nationalism VS pacifism stuff if it becomes a debate. It’s all well and good. Personally, I like some of both: remembrance, sadness, sympathy for the many bereaved and afflicted, tempered with some concept that war is bad, and that peace is the final goal. Again, all well and good.

But we are a very conflicted bunch. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say we are confused on these subjects, the appreciation and treatment of our veterans and their families, as well as anything around violence and its consequences, such as police brutality (to use an old-fashioned expression about it). Maybe I’m not reading the right things, but from my limited perspective, it doesn’t seem to be something that we ever break down, it doesn’t seem that either we try to understand it, or that we simply fail in the attempt.

All the talk about our veterans is, uh, a little too positive to help us get to the truth of it, it’s all about the positive aspects of sacrifice, about heroism, and it doesn’t explain how our soldiers can get the shoddy treatment that many of them get after their service. To explain that requires a visit to the dark side, I’m afraid. In this case, the operative thing, the driving function behind it lies in the soldier’s job description. That isn’t a secret, we all know it. But, that it matters in this conversation is somehow a secret, nonetheless. So here it is.

It is a soldier’s job to die for his country.

This is our conflict. Perhaps it’s only a matter of perception. If we phrase it in this way, describing the sacrifice in the more negative way, we can see that the conflict disappears, like this:

We ship a person overseas to fight and very likely die, even more likely these days to suffer loss of limb and traumatic brain injury. Here’s the thing: this is not good treatment. Therefore, refusal of adequate medical and psychiatric care and the refusal of financial support that so many ex-soldiers suffer, wait for it . . . is not a conflict. It is not any change in how we have treated these people from the day we decided to send them into war. To say it another way, our abuse of these folks starts long before they come home.

Let’s imagine it from another angle. Let’s imagine that we can hear the people in power discussing what we all perceive as our failure to look after our warriors, that we can hear the generals, the State Department, the politicians. Let’s try to see it from the POV of some powerful, cynical leaders when they are dividing up our dwindling tax revenues and deciding where to spend our money. Imagine how much priority is given to the care of a person that we already sent off to die. These folks aren’t likely to forget that it is a soldier’s job to die.

Call me a cynic to say it, but I am indeed cynical enough to imagine that it gets said, hopefully half in jest by these folks, that our wounded veterans failed at their job. Old cynic that I am, I find it impossible to imagine that no-one in these positions ever said “You had ONE job!” To carry on in this dark vein, sending a person off in a modern war to die on the far side of the globe – that isn’t cheap either. For the budgeteers of our world, soldiers cost money going out and coming back. Do I need to say it? Going out is the essential part of a soldier’s journey in many of our minds, and it certainly is in the minds of the men signing the cheques.

What I’m trying to say, getting back to it, is that the mistreatment of our heroes is not some detail, not some unintended consequence of war. It is intrinsic, it is logical even, it is part and parcel of the war machine generally, and it is not likely to change. It is fully in line with war and its objects. Mistreatment of veterans is not a problem we can fix while we’re at war, while we love war. It’s not going anywhere. The masters of war are just patiently waiting for us to get it off our chests and then shut up again.

If you’ve got a problem with that, then your problem is with war. Which, if you have a problem with war, that’s a good thing.

But just so you know.