Month: August 2021

I am one of the 75 percent of Americans who supported ending the war in Afghanistan. Twenty years … what were we thinking?  It’s not a disrespect toward our military personnel, serving for American pride, custom, bravery and/or career training and college funding.  It’s not a lack of empathy toward Afghan girls and women who will once again live under harsh rules and unspeakable abuse and indecency.  It’s not misunderstanding a different culture, one that follows their religion with a sincere piety.  It’s not forgetting 9/11 and the attacks on our World Trade Center, Pentagon and attempt on the White House.

In 2008, years into our two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I voted for Barack Obama as President because I thought he would end the wars.  He ended one but not both.  Yet true to his word he was in charge when Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, was captured and summarily killed.  That was really all Americans wanted.  But our military remained in both countries.

Memory seems blurry, it’s been a generation ago.  But we entered Afghanistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks because … what?  Their people were seen in news footage on September 11, 2001, cheering the deaths and injuries of Americans and destruction of vitally important buildings? 

The Afghanistan government and the people of that country had nothing to do with 9/11.  We knew it at the time.  And to our shock, we soon learned their impoverished country was essentially living in the 7^th century, forced by intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and daily public beheadings and stonings by a severe form of Islamic fundamentalists: al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Decisions were swift, but the U.S. entered Afghanistan and then for some reason Iraq.  We were supposed to be fighting terrorism by these sects of Islamic fundamentalism.

But practically all of the men who were part of the highly coordinated and audacious 9/11 attack—soaring two American passenger airplanes directly into the Twin Towers in New York City—were from Saudi Arabia.  Our enemies came from that nation.  Yet we did not go to war with the Saudis.  We had too much to lose.  It is where the oil is.  Because we needed their oil, the U.S. has been hated in that part of the world for most of the 20^th century.

Apocalypse now

In the beginning of the Iraq-Afghanistan wars, there was lots of talk by American fundamentalist Christians about the End Times and a great war between Christians and whoever is depicted as the anti-Christ.  In my lifetime, the anti-Christ has morphed several times over: from all communists, the Soviet Union, China, and then out of nowhere Muslims and all Middle Eastern nations except Israel.  Just lately it has come to my attention that the anti-Christ is now the Democrats.  Yikes!  Hey.  That would include me.  How can I be my own enemy?

I’m joking a bit, but I never believed in war, any war.  No more war.  I vaguely remember Vietnam.  In the 1960s mentioning it was controversial in movies, art, TV shows and music.  Americans back then were to keep their mouths and minds shut and support the war, the police action that would become America’s longest war.  When Americans totally left, it was a shocking mess that we and the whole world witnessed on TV.  Our soldiers had fought a war to prevent the spread of communism.  Then we realized: the communists were in it for the long run.  Vietnam had a complex history way before the U.S. got involved.  It was convoluted.  The draft was still going on, and America’s youth protested fighting and dying for a cause they did not support.

And then it was over.  So, five years later in high school American history, I learned the lesson of Vietnam: America cannot be the world’s savior.

The rest of the 1970s and even the 1980s and ’90s were a good run of basically thinking we’d learned our lesson and would never go to war again.  The suits in D.C. authorized millions of tax money to keep nations from going to war.  Can you believe we ever did that?  And as I recall, IT WORKED.  Big money was something the U.S. could hold over other nations that happened to have bully and dangerous leaders.  Folks, it’s called diplomacy.  And that’s what I believe in.  Research the problem, help the people—and whatever we do, avoid war.

Then to my surprise, in 1991 we were in the Persian Gulf War.  Everyone watched it on CNN.  A few months later, the whole thing was over.  But it wasn’t.  I knew we would return.  We did not stop our arch enemy Saddam Hussein, the brutal leader of Iraq.

President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney are responsible for getting the U.S. into two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Right after 9/11, we were cocksure the United States military would blow up the area back to the Bronze Age.  And we did.  And we thought it would be like the Persian Gulf War in 1991, a breeze.

It’s hard today facing the enormous loss of lives and trillions of dollars.  Twenty years?  None of us thought we’d still be left in what ten years ago the media dubbed ‘America’s Forgotten War,’ the war in Afghanistan.  Should the U.S. have kept a foothold in Afghanistan like we have in South Korea and other countries around the world?  Technology has changed modern warfare.  If necessary, we can hit precise targets, still with loss of life but not necessarily our own.  We don’t even have to be inside the country or anywhere near it.  But let us never forget and always remember that all war is about humans killing other humans.  That’s the point.

As Americans we are once again left feeling about Afghanistan like we did at the very bitter end of the long Vietnam War: good riddance, glad it’s over, let them solve their own problems, anger, numb, we made a huge mistake leaving & should’ve stayed, wishing we could fix life for the people there, determined to never get so entrenched trying to save a country on the other side of the world, ‘never again’ to war … most of all feeling sorry for our fellow Americans who served in the military over there, our Gold Star families and wounded warriors, the many with post-traumatic stress disorders, the good Afghans, and ourselves, of course.  From the President to every single American, we’re alone in stunned silence and defeat, feeling sorry as hell.

Jennifer Aniston shared a personal decision to stop talking with family and loved ones who refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccine, virtually writing them off.  For months she has tried to convince people about whom she cares to get the shot but to no avail.  She’s stood strong on her conviction that the vaccine prevents the new virus from spreading and in turn fewer people will catch it, end up in the hospital or even die from the disease.  But no more begging for the celebrity and well-known actress of Friends.  She’s tired of the illogical circular arguments and heated fights, each side trying to convince the other whose truth is the real truth—dealing with people who distrust substantiated news based on nothing but the facts and instead stubbornly prefer media whose purpose is not to objectively report the news but to promote and foster conservative politics.

I know exactly how she feels.

Since the Covid-19 vaccine, every week I have asked my parents if they’ve gotten it yet.  I am saddened to find their mindset remains with tens of millions of Americans who refuse and reject the vaccine, proclaiming their independence from a government mandate. My elderly parents have no intention of getting the Covid-19 vaccine.  Out of the blue, they simply do not believe in this vaccine, remaining highly suspicious of one that was developed at lightning speed and miraculously has effectively kept the vast majority of vaccinated from getting the virus and dying from it.

Counting flowers on the wall

These are the same parents who during my childhood in the 1960s and ’70s made sure their children were up to date on all recommended immunizations.  There was no debate or question about it.  Vaccines were universally accepted.  Parents didn’t have time to research every single childhood immunization.  Schools insisted parents keep their children’s immunization records up to date.  It was very serious business dealt every year before school started.  In those days, too, there was no internet—although concerned parents could go to the library and research the science behind immunizations against a host of once deadly and miserable childhood diseases they faced and more likely their parents contracted.  My grandmother talked about surviving yellow fever circa 1910.  She was deathly ill for close to a year and lost all her hair.  Somehow she survived, and in time her hair grew back.

My parents had practically every childhood disease of the first half of the 20^th century.  Vaccines were unheard of.  They also could have contracted polio but fortunately for them, they didn’t.

The people who raised me understood vaccines, the science, the urgency, the importance, and therefore ensured the best modern medicine for my healthy childhood.  I didn’t realize it as I do now: My parents provided those vaccines out of love for their children.  Throughout the years, my parents were the type to get the annual flu vaccine and got the pneumonia vaccine when it was developed.

But that’s not who they are anymore.

It’s like invasion of the body snatchers.  Something’s infiltrated their brains, their once reasonable thinking.  And since they refuse to have a computer and the internet and do not subscribe to news journals or newspapers, all the information they know about Covid-19 and the vaccine come from one source: Fox.  I won’t call it news because it’s not a news business.  Look it up.  It’s a conservative broadcast media network, specifically created to present news with a sharp political viewpoint, right of center.  It literally was founded to counter the mainstream news for perceived hippie leftist pro-Democrat bias. The number of Americans who refuse the Covid-19 vaccine equal the same number of Fox fans and more than likely the same number who did not vote for President Biden. 

And that’s the way it is

Just a few decades ago, we all got the same news even if covered by three different networks, dozens of major daily newspapers and radio stations and analyzed by monthly and weekly periodicals.  The news was fact based, substantiated, serious, no kidding, sobering—and most importantly real.

Today with the internet’s plethora of ‘enter-newsment’ or ‘newsertainment’—stories that are not journalism and play fast and loose with the facts, if even that—half the country has become brain dead.  They only read, hear and see what they want.  And if the internet’s unregulated array of dubious news sources doesn’t reach everyone, Fox cable does.  The format is nothing but Republican political opinion presented by the most attractive talking heads on the air.  The other 24-hour cable news networks also are mostly political opinion but presented from real-deal reporters in a calm level-headed manner. That’s a welcome difference to me.

But Fox knows a lot of people prefer emotional appeal on every subject nowadays.  How this century’s pandemic and vaccine have become an angry American political grudge match that has stressed and split families, friends and colleagues, not to mention doctors and their patients, beats me.  I suspect the uproar is from trusting the wrong media: the one that routinely plays on human emotions like fear, confusion, distrust, anger, impatience, jealousy, prejudice and hate.  Swirl in ignorance, and we all will remain in this real and deadly health crisis for a long time.  The problem is millions of Americans think they are smarter than doctors, scientists, public health experts, pharmacists, biologists and virologists.  And they all trust the same source for their information.  Their defense against the vaccine is ‘This is America’ and they can believe anything they want.  It’s dumbfounded.