Moderation and Balance over Extremism, Hate and Hyper Zeal

Zeal is good: passion for our "great" ideas and principles is good to have and experience and grow with.

But the rest? No.

I did not have Donald Trump in mind when I started this post a few months ago.

But I am a Republican of two decades now, and I fear him.

I do not like many Republicans--let me rephrase that: there are millions of Republicans that I like. But many others seem like boors. Like "The Donald". And more of that distaste started when many of them did not vote for Romney a few years back. People can be dolts. I understand better how Hitler came to power. People are often fooled. And caught up in dangerous tides and waves.

Anyway, I hope all politicians can learn moderation.

The Vietnam Conflict: The War that Wasn't a War

     As a small child in the 1970s nobody talked about Vietnam, or that there was a lot of fighting and death there involving millions of US personnel. At least not mentioned to me. I was the type who liked to know about American wars, or any military conflicts anywhere. We collected National Geographic Magazines that I would analyze closely. In 3rd or 4th grade I placed sticky notes to mark all the photographs of any person or equipment with anything related to armies, navies, soldiers or wars in our stacks of old magazines. There were many. I had a picture book about World War II, I got more from my grandfather. I watched a lot of movies and even cartoons about past conflicts, Paul Revere in the American Independence, Indian Wars in the US, MASH on network television... I would check out books from the school and local libraries about warriors, past and present.
     Of course, I was at a precocious age where such topics as Vietnam were probably considered too much for young ears. But, despite my ignorance of this US military campaign, I think there was a specific national shame about Vietnam. People did not want to talk about it. However, I was very much aware of World War II, the Korean Conflict, the First World War, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Those were the battles and images I would use to play countless hours outside while watching films about them in the home. And regardless of the pain and horror of them, they were battles and wars that we eventually won.
    Vietnam? Not so fast.
    There were many losers in Southeast Asia by the 1970s. And we had lost a lot. Some would argue it was all a waste. A debate for another post, I posit.
    But all these years during and since, now in 2016, we still have problems defining it as a war.

   It was not a war, it was just a conflict. We killed perhaps a million enemy in 15 years of countless shelling and bombs and firefights and sorties, and we lost the equivalent of thirty army brigades, if each brigade were composed of 2,000 soldiers. Only 30. Over 15 years? That would only be 6 months of the Second World War.
   Pshaw, not a war.

   Think again. It was war. It was awful. It certainly was a war.

   And while many may not think it amounted to much success, with the Vietcong overtaking the south and being lost to Viet Communism, it may have saved other millions, other countries like Thailand. We may never know for sure if it was worth all the death and trauma.

      But one thing I believe I can declare: it was a war. Some conflicts deserve that appellation.
  
      Our presence in Southeast Asia from 1960 to 1975 deserves that.

      Our numbers of casualties come nowhere close to those in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, from 2001 until now.

      And we all know these are and were wars in our 21st century. No question.

     Wars are not fun for the winners, or the losers. But they change who we are. And how we think. And how we talk. And how we operate and act, and progress or digress economically.

     There are reasons to be ashamed of things; wars fall into those categories. For those who gave their lives and souls to that war, who came home missing limbs or parts of your conscience, I wish you all peaceful dreams and memories knowing that this was a war that saved a few. Hard to say how many, but you did something.

Like the Vietnam War. If you were part of it, you were ordered to go, you did your duty.

And this many years later the US and Vietnam are friends. Long live the peace. May all wars teach us lessons of how to avoid worse errors.

Lessons for My Little Ones ... Growing Bigger All the Time: Marx

MARX a couple hundred years later. For children everywhere

Including my own.

    A few years ago (2012) I was far away from home while my eldest daughter was beginning middle school; I reflected back on what I was learning about our planet in the 1980s during those formative years.

     Back then in the early Reagan years, when the Cold War was hot, I happened to have a great junior high school teacher named Mr. Courtney. He taught us extensively about Russia, or the USSR in those days, of which he had studied in college: he knew and breathed their history, had graduated with a degree in the enemy's background. It was as if a human in Star Trek had become a subject matter expert about the Klingons. Fascinating, Captain. He was marvelous; our notes were copied assiduously from his handwritten chalk on the front classroom blackboards at this lower level mini-universe at Binford Middle School, Bloomington, Indiana. Middle America, the West's heartland. Those lessons and words took a magic quality as he recounted the birth of Bolshevism and Communism under Lenin and later Stalin, evolving from the tragic legacy of Tsarism and global expansion from Mother Russia. Curious and cold giant with its beautiful yet deadly ways. Us versus Them, as Pink Floyd has narrated wisely.

     We were patriotic but respectful, the enemy was real. Foreign, strange, and different yet smart and powerful and in many ways striving for the same greatness as the United States. The world was divided, and I was on the right side. We had food. We had money. We had freedom of the press. Capitalism worked, despite the inflation and unemployment and crime issues ... But this Cold War with the Soviets loomed over everything, even with hostages taken in Teheran or troubles in the West Bank, or OPEC making the pumps run costly ... Soviet troops were advancing everywhere, like Afghanistan. Their missiles and our missiles made the great Dr. Seuss puzzle us with the Butter Battle Book. It mirrored the horror and awful truth of our planet in perpetual schism.

     It was real. These guys, originally authors and economists and then demagogues and dictators had affected our lives with East-West enmity and the the subsequent threat of nuclear devastation, something all of us became nightmarishly aware of. While many grown-ups may have relaxed under the adage of Mutually Assured Destruction, I had plotted my escape from school to bike home and hole up in our little-used basement when the missiles destroyed our civilization.

     I had comic books, no electricity required. And we had food storage down there to boot.

     Fast forward to the 1990s: I had a Bachelor's degree and some would consider me educated. I had lived abroad, learned a different tongue, culture. Formally yes, I had become more aware. Internally I had my thoughts and biases. I heard some arguments in many fashions, I contemplated multiple view points. But Communists were bad. They were wrong. They got millions killed, and threatened the rest with starvation. Not just suppression on freedom. STARVATION.

     So I was "Educated". I read things, I discussed things, like politics and history; I watched things and thought about things. I saw things, i.e. geo-politics, as an American, but also nuanced in that I had seen some poverty and knew people intimately that believed that socialism or communism would be the answer to bring the masses the goods and alleged freedoms that they deserved. Some world issues I was rolling over in my brain since the late 1970s when I was in third and fourth grade. But twenty years later things were taking better shape, the contours of the real world seemed to make more sense.

    Poverty is not cool. It is not comfortable. It turns grown men and women into "less than", a human condition that most Americans resent. We, as human beings, homo sapiens, are "greater thans".

    Fiodor Dostoyevsky knew this. I read Crime and Punishment in 1997. And all things started to become a bit more clear...

   Russia. Great Mother Russia adopted Marx.

   And so it went.