someone I care about caught up in this fucking mess our government has made in Iraq
I'm angry, but it's the old distant anger, the feeling of "this is wrong, I should be angry"...no...it's not should be, it's am, and yet the emotional center is far away; the angry words are there in my head but my heart is bored, uninvested; I'm coming to understand that almost for sure this is because it would be breaking otherwise. I need to not be frustrated with myself for not being able to care always. It is...and this is TRUE, Gabi...(oh no referring to self in second person, bad sign)...in fact because I am so passionate, so loving, so deeply able to experience the joys and pains of people anywhere in the world as real, and not because I am fundamentally cold and detached, that I sometimes shut down because otherwise would be totally overwhelmed.
Being in touch with A. again is going to be brutally hard for a wide array of reasons, and perhaps I shouldn't have started it, but I did, and I can't go back now.
A. is a friend in the military whom I just got back in touch with spontaneously...only to learn that he is in Baghdad, on his second deployment, for 15 months after only a year back in the United States.
He is finding ways to make it through tasks no-one in the military was ever remotely trained to do, from creating a legal system from the ground up to repairing infrastructure. He is watching the military decay around him from the inside out, extended beyond reason by a Washington administration that doesn't care; that, as he put it, treats soldiers like "expendable dolls". He is 25 years old and is second in command in a 90-man Cavalry unit, just trying to make sure his men come back alive from missions that have no clear purpose; that to him seem like chasing ghosts.
Things are going to change
they have to
the world does not need to be this way. It does not. We know everything we need to know now to make it stop and all we need is some people in power who actually give a shit about human beings. I'm willing to be in power if that's what it takes. No more of the good people standing by. No more. There will not be another generation in my family, in my country, where the good people say "power? who wants power? not me!" and by doing so allow those who want nothing but power to run the world to the destruction of everyone else and all that is beautiful.
more later
sleep now
Being in touch with A. again is going to be brutally hard for a wide array of reasons, and perhaps I shouldn't have started it, but I did, and I can't go back now.
A. is a friend in the military whom I just got back in touch with spontaneously...only to learn that he is in Baghdad, on his second deployment, for 15 months after only a year back in the United States.
He is finding ways to make it through tasks no-one in the military was ever remotely trained to do, from creating a legal system from the ground up to repairing infrastructure. He is watching the military decay around him from the inside out, extended beyond reason by a Washington administration that doesn't care; that, as he put it, treats soldiers like "expendable dolls". He is 25 years old and is second in command in a 90-man Cavalry unit, just trying to make sure his men come back alive from missions that have no clear purpose; that to him seem like chasing ghosts.
Things are going to change
they have to
the world does not need to be this way. It does not. We know everything we need to know now to make it stop and all we need is some people in power who actually give a shit about human beings. I'm willing to be in power if that's what it takes. No more of the good people standing by. No more. There will not be another generation in my family, in my country, where the good people say "power? who wants power? not me!" and by doing so allow those who want nothing but power to run the world to the destruction of everyone else and all that is beautiful.
more later
sleep now