Osama Bin Laden is dead. Yay? I don't know, is that how I should feel? I feel sad. I feel angry. I feel angry that I was born into a culture of war, that war effects us on a daily basis. Seeps into the core of our anatomy until we can no longer separate it from our organic selves. The past ten years we have been at war. Since the planes hit, we have been living in a state of trauma. During the nineties we were at war. I was born in 1980, five years after the end of Vietnam. My father served in Vietnam and this is not usually the shit I get into on my blog, but every living male in my family over the age of thirty, on both sides, has served in a war. My grandfathers all served in war. Vietnam irreparably changed and hurt my father. Not a day goes by that he doesn't think about what happened not just to him, the country, the people of Vietnam and to his friends. At my grandfathers funeral they hung a photo of his WW11 platoon. Of the 50 odd men standing in the photo, he was one of two to return. My same grandfathers nephew committed suicide in 1976, after he returned from War. There is nothing romantic, valiant or beautiful about war. It is an ugly way to die, it is an ugly way to bring death. It hurts everyone involved and for the most part, much of its has been unnecessary. Watching these Tea Party racist assholes spout bullshit about going back to ' the way things used to be, old American values' makes me wonder what old American values do you speak of? What golden age have you hallucinated yourself into, in order to go on?
