On the verge of extinction again July 5, 1985
Fleas, fleas, eating me alive!
I thought I got rid of them last week when I gave Spud a
bath and a subsequent treatment. But alas, the little devils are not so easily
tamed.
Not even a roach bomb
will completely void them. I do not like taking life indiscriminately, but
these buggers are eating me alive.
I write this on the anniversary of Hiroshima, knowing that I
launched two bombs of my own to free myself of this invasion.
It is easy to kill when you look at everything simply as
their side and ours, and any excuse for murder will do.
We excused the bomb dropped 40 years ago by claiming they
would ultimately save American lives, when in fact they established American hegemony
in the Pacific and kept the nasty Ruskies from filling in Southeast Asia the
way they did Eastern Europe.
But then, it is easy to make judgements about the past based
on what we know four decades later, when we are still looking at Vietnam in the
rearview mirror.
This is the reason I can’t condemn America for the Japanese
internment camps – the way some of my professors do, understanding how little
we knew back then about the threat, and who we could trust, and whether or not
to expect other acts of terror.
We are in a different place today, much the way Germans were
after World War I, being punished so severely for starting that war that it
ultimately led to another more hideous regime and an even more ghastly war.
This is very similar to reconstruction after the American
Civil War when the vicious victors decided to humiliate the south and led to Jim
Crow and an even more hideous repression of former slaves.
The South remained defiant despite its defeat, and this irritated
those who hoped to see former slave owners crawling and begging for mercy.
These days we live in the aftermath of Vietnam and find
ourselves much in the same boat as the southerners, but instead of putting up
statues to Confederate heroes, we create human statues in our media like Rambo –
acting defiant in our humiliation.
Meanwhile, we are engaged in the same secret wars, having
not learned our lessons from Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam, fighting a new proxy
war against the Soviets in Central America – and perhaps in Afghanistan, too.
We never cease sending our stealth warriors to go battle in
places where local civilians are most likely to be the ones to suffer,
eventually escalating back to the point where we send B52 bombers. It is easy
to see people as fleas from so many miles up.
Meanwhile, we arm locals to do our fighting for us, pretending
that the soldiers we send as advisors, do not constitute a miliary action,
while back home media turns a blind eye to our involvement.
Just how many countries bordering Russia and China are we
doing this in, arming local residents, making them fight our war, forcing them
to bleed blood we are too scared to bleed for ourselves after having bled so
much in Vietnam?
And here I’m engaged in my own war with fleas, knowing that
by letting my cats out into the yard, they bring back this unseen enemy I must
later annihilate. I try to keep the cats contained, to not let them out, only
to have them petition me for freedom, crying to be let out, and then once out
and infested, crying to be let back in.
All this goes through my head as I hear about secret arms
deals being made, and wonder at what point does it reach a breaking point, when
does such actions – such as the shooting of some Prussian Duke lead us into a
new world conflict – one in which we need a new Hiroshima but in New York, or Moscow
or Paris? Are we so crazy as to push ourselves to the point where we can justify
pushing the button to end the world?
And here I worry about killing fleas? Had I thought to
purchase flea collars in the spring, I might have avoided this whole conflict.
Had someone thought to talk peace before arming our allies,
we might have avoided coming to the brink of extinction.
Have we learning nothing from our experiences? Must we
constantly repeat the same mistakes and come to the same bloody conclusion?
Do I like the cats out or in, knowing that ultimately, each
action will lead to mass slaughter?
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