A Nation At War

Good Morning Everyone,

Just sitting up here at my workplace, taking a few minutes out of my day to chat with you while listening to a little John Coltrane on my iPod.

Haven't really chatted it up with you in a few days. Still haven't figured out that fine line between life living and acounting for said life in the pages of a blog. I feel like I might have some loose ends to tie up on these pages but...well, I don't feel like doing a lot of writing about it. Let's see if I can do some summing up.

Woke up this morning and my fiance made me a nice breakfast consisting of scrambled eggs with onion, tomato, green pepper and mozarella. It was a great way to start out the morning and because of that, I now know that I'm not sure how to spell mozarella.

I think I mentioned Jon Stewart was awesome. If I find the time, I'll go into my past entries where I've mentioned him and take the "h" out of his first name as I now know it no longer belongs there.

I spend most of my time at my fiance's now, which I love very much. Still, I miss my grill, my G5 with the 23" cinedisplay, and my 60" HiDef TV. I'm looking forward to when I officially move in to Kristine's place so I can have all my stuff there.

Here's an amusing note. Because Kristine has gone over her minutes for the month on her cell phone and since she doesn't have a land line, I am without a cell for the next couple of things. This sharing lives thing has taken me to place I never imagined.

Last but not least, I have this engagement party to be thing lingering like a cloud over my head and it's giving me a bit of a headache. Since some of the key players are familiar with this blog and since I don't desire to spend a lot of time writing about the ongoing events, let me just say blaaaaaaaaa... for now and I'll keep you posted when the exciting details occur.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT

So I'd like to do something a little different today and talk about the war. Kind of and exhausting topic, the war. Just this very moment, I had to take a break from this blog entry and play the first level of Bejeweled 2 on Yahoo games so as not to fall asleep from my brain wanting to shut down.

Here's a question. Has everyone noticed that the war in Iraq is the new space program. Remember when you first heard about the space program and how exciting it was? Now, if it weren't for things like satelite radio and television, I would have no idea that they were still running missions up into space. Since I could care less about Iraqi radio or tv, I'm just so completely out of that loop. But I guess that why I'm talking about it now.

I have a good friend out west somewhere. In addition to being a cool guy, he an interesting guy to talk to as he thinks like noone else I know. I never know what he's going to say and I always find his words entertaining and inspiring. So I harp on him a bit about starting his own blog and yesterday he responded to my email by telling me that noone would care what he had to say and that it would just make him angry. He then proceeded to rant a bit about the war.

Isn't that weird? And I don't mean that specific to him. I mean...WE'RE AT WAR!!! I know, our president said that the mission was accomplished and that we're not at war anymore, but come on. We're at war. If you use the words "death" and "freedom" consistently to describe what your doin, then there's a war going on. So isn't it strange then that the majority of us who oppose this war don't feel motivated to keep shouting until it ends?

It makes me wonder about Vietnam. I grew up on all those films. I mean, did any of you think to yourself while watching Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or hell, even Good Morning Vietnam that this would happen again? It makes me wonder about all the protester hippy types you would see in those movies and wonder if there presence was that prominent or if the clips we've seen are more like NFL highlights on SportsCenter. Certainly, the protest movement isn't felt to any degree in this time and age. Whereas I always felt Vietnam was an emotional rollercoaster, Iraq feels more like a business deal that isn't going very well.

By the way, let me say that when my friend sent me his email, I didn't get through it all the way at first. I read a little bit yesterday and then finished it today. I think yesterday I got as far as "There were no weapons of mass destruction found." I mean, Jesus Christ. It was the foundation of us going to war and now whenever I hear that, I have this mental voice inside my head that says, "Yeah yeah, we know. We know." How fucking weird is that?

I've figured out some things that have allowed my brain to mentally check out of the whole thing. First of all, I'm not going. There's no draft and even if there was, I fall outside the age bracket. Boy, I never thought I'd be thrilled to say that. Still, I used to believe that given my age and a body not fit for war would keep me out of our government's desired war fighting demographic. Yeah, no. If you signed up in World War I and you still have a little time left on your service, you may very well get a call. Good Lord.

Here's anothing thing that's allowed me to check out. More than half of our country decided to keep the president who started this war in office. I mean, Wow. What can you do about that? That means, for every one of me, there are another 1.something people out there who think I'm wrong. Where do you go from there? It's very odd to be in the minority and yet, so absolutely certain that the majority are out of there minds. To be fair, I will say that I'm certain the majority looks at me in the same way and thanks god that there's fewer of us silly people than them.

So, I sadfully admit there's a large part of me that says, "Well fine. I guess this whole war thing is your problem then since I can't fight and I don't seem to matter in the grande scheme of things." (Because if I could fight, I wouldn't care if I was outnumbered 20:1. I'd fight every one of ya before my ass woke up in Iraq.) But that's really the wrong attitude, isn't it? We live in the land of democracy where each indiviual person matters and we're supposed to express our opinions for the greater good of our society, even when they conflict with the majority. I mean, I'm guessing. I wasn't the brightest student in my school, but I'm pretty sure that's what I was taught. Everyone of us matters.

So what does this all mean? To be honest, I'm not sure. I'm not about to turn this blog into a political forum because I myself am immensely bored by politics. I will say this though. The one thing that really struck a chord in me in my friend's email was when he listed the GI's who were killed the other day as a result of the war. They are:

Charles Cooper Jr. 19 years old from Jamestown NY
Darren Deblanc. 20 years old from Evansville Indiana
William Edens 29 years old from Columbia MO.
Timothy Kiser 37 from Teham California
Eric Morris 31 from Sparks Nevada
Robert Murray 21 from Westfield Indiana
Ricky Rockholt 28 from Winston Oregon
Joseph Tremblay 23 from New Windsor NY

I think I'm going to ask my friend, Mr. X if he will continue to send me those names so I can update them here. It will be my way of reminding the world of the significance of our occupation in Iraq.

I mean, I guess if you want to, you can throw your two cents in in the comments section. I have a friend or two that support the current administration so that might make for an interesting read. I think the other thing that I'll do is if any of you have a blog and you have an entry regarding the current administration or the war, let me know and I'll link to it. I think I'll skip on linking to news sites regarding the war. There's 20 million of them. You can find them on your own.

There you go. I'm now exhausted but I feel a little relieved. I got out some deep thoughts. Oh...Actually, I guess I should mention as I may not have been clear about this, that I think the war is pointless and unnecessary and I think it's a shame that we have young men and women who are dying because they believe they are making this USA a safer place to live in.

So there ya go. That's a bit of life according to Dave. One last note. It took me a year to write this and the last thing I feel like doing is proofreading this write now. I'll probably do it later but I just wanted to let you know that I like keeping my entries in good spelling order and fairly ok grammer order. If you read something not grammatically correct, 9 times out of 10, that's is how I would have said it out loud. So now I will finish my game of Bejeweled 2, eat some lunch and then get some work done.

See ya l8r.