Syria, Russia, and What I Can Say With Certainty (Part 1)

Part 1: The Behavior of President Assad

I cannot say for certain President Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons on his own people. It would have been a foolish thing to do, epically foolish. If he did so, his actions will go down in history as one of the stupidest deeds ever committed, along with the Trojans deciding to open their gates for a present from their enemies. But I have no way of knowing whether or not he actually did it.

If Assad gassed his own people right when his chances for survival seemed most likely, he would have had to been out his mind when he did it, because the U.S. has been looking for an excuse to overthrow the government in Syria for three decades and the impulse has been growing in intensity these last few years. He would have to be more than clinically depressed or even suicidal to hand the U.S. the perfect excuse. The insanity required to do what Assad is accused of doing would have gone way beyond even Norman Bates-dress-like-your mother-and-murder-people crazy, because Norman Bates at least had the good sense of keeping his behavior out of the public eye. No, using chemical weapons on his own people would have required President Assad to be full-on, bath salts, eat-the-face-of-some-dude-while-the-cops-are-watching kind of crazy. But I’m not saying he didn’t do it.

And if Assad did use chemical weapons on his own people after making a bargain to get rid of all his chemical weapons, he must have been out of his mind on more than one occasion, the other time being when the Russians explained to him what it would take for him to make it out of his predicament alive. See, Russia stuck its neck out in a way it never has before for President Assad. They made a very diplomatic move and got the world to agree that Assad could stay in power if he agreed to give up his chemical weapons. Russia must have been very clear in its instructions to Assad, telling him exactly what he needed to do to survive. For Assad to have ignored the Russians when they explained this must mean he was out of his mind then as well. Perhaps not bath salts crazy, but at least stoned out his gourd. “Bashar, you must not give the U.S. the slightest bit of provocation or they will use it to overthrow your government and Syria will be a steaming post-apocalyptic version of its former self. Do you understand?” “Yeah, dude, we’re cool. Hey, you got any Twinkies, Boris?” But I’m not saying Assad did not do what he is accused of.

If Putin stuck his neck out the way he did, and Assad was keeping a couple of chemical weapons stashed away just for a special moment, then I would think Putin would want to bomb Assad himself. What kind of man betrays the person who has saved his life just so he can go out in a blaze of glory, chemical weapons blazing? And how stupid must Putin be—while at the same time being smart enough to get his candidate elected President of the United States by deceiving everybody who didn’t vote for Hillary, of course—to put his faith in someone with a death wish?

But Assad cannot be behaving the way he is as a way of suicide-by-cops, as we say here in the U.S. He knows just what is at stake. He knows if the savages—I mean moderate rebels—take control of his country what will happen. He’s seen it before when the American-backed brutal-er, moderate rebels anal-raped Gadhafi before killing him. It will be worse for Assad. They’re not just going to rape him, they’re going to kill his family, and brutally oppress the Religious minority to which he belongs.

Moderate though they may be, the rebels the U.S. has been backing have been capable of some rather immoderate behavior, behavior such as beheading twelve-year-old boys and eating the internal organs of their slain foes. They are the same type of people who killed dozens of Coptic Christians as they were in church for Palm Sunday service last week. They’re the same sort of people we use as an excuse for not allowing Syrian refugees into our country. Far better to let them stay in Syria and fight for freedom. They’re good enough to be the face of freedom against tyranny in the perpetually messed-up Middle East, but God forbid they ever get within our borders. Let’s face it, as far as moderates go, they’re kind of on the far end of the spectrum.

By the way, don’t believe it is mere speculation as to the behavior of these cannibalistic moderate rebels. The video of the actions of these child murdering moderate rebels is available for all to see on the internet. No need to take the word of anonymous sources from secret agencies, the facts are pretty hard to deny.

But all of this is not my way of saying Assad did not gas his own people at the very moment his safety, the safety of his family and his fellow Alawites seemed assured after a years-long bloody struggle. There are many people in this world with extreme sexual fetishes, perhaps being anal raped before being murdered is one of Assad’s. I have no way of knowing for sure. Unlike our news media, I have no access to anonymous sources from agencies who only want what’s best for Syria.

War Without End (If We're Lucky)

The War Generation

We now have a generation reaching adulthood that has never known our nation at peace. We now have people old enough to join the military  to fight the war on terror whose earliest memories included the war on terror. Terror is all they’ve known, terror is the mindset they’ve been raised on.

And there is no end in sight for these children raised on terror. There is no end zone to be reached, no promised land, no ultimate objectives in this war. They have known nothing but war, and peace doesn’t seem to be raising its head anytime soon for them.

No other generation of Americans has ever been through anything like it. World War 2 lasted 4 years. People went to war and came home, intent on enjoying the peace and prosperity they fought for.  World War I lasted a brief year for us Americans,  and our entry into it was with the understanding that it was the war to end all war. That is after all the idea behind war, right? To put things to right so that the world is returned to its normal state and we can once again enjoy peace?

But that’s no longer the world we live in, not a world some of us have ever known. War is the new normal, war is just a part of life, a part of who we are, or at least who we have become.

And we’ve saddled an entire generation to the vision we’ve created. We’ve subjected our youth to an existence without the hope of--or the blueprint for--peace.

I wonder what it must be like for them. I was born in the Vietnam Era, can remember the end as helicopters rose from rooftops with people trying to hold on. I was of a generation who experienced wars that ended. Perhaps they didn’t have a clear-cut purpose or justification, but they eventually ended.

The war we’re involved in now has no end. It has no justification, summary, no purpose. It is merely war. It is the inheritance we bequeath to the generation that follows us. It is the unanswered question we never got around to solving because we were too busy taking our children to soccer practice and karate class. It was what we ignored in order to work extra hours so we could purchase a little something for under the tree come Christmas. I hope you enjoyed your new gaming system, junior.

I wonder how they view the world we’ve created for them, wonder if they can see things through the same twisted lens we see through. Perhaps when the television presents them with the information that we’ve bombed some country they’ve never heard of, it won’t register much in their consciousness. After all, why should they find it odd when it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s just what America does.

I can’t imagine them questioning it or evaluating the morality of it. It’s just something the government does, and they are not the government. The government is some foreign entity, unanswerable and uncaring to people such as they. How can they feel culpable for what the government has done, even though it ostensibly does it in their name? The people who make the decisions to bomb are as distant to them as the countries that are being bombed.

Given their lifelong immersion in it, how can they view war as anything other than a force of nature? How can they perceive of it any differently than primitive man saw the weather? Rainfall last night, bombs fall tomorrow. Earthquakes or explosions in some other part of the world but it doesn’t affect us.

How will they ever appreciate the value humanity has placed on peace when we have not educated them on the subject? How can they appreciate peace as a desired goal when we have for so long tolerated not having a goal or an honestly debated cause for war? Our wars are justified by lies and when the lies are discovered they are justified by the fact that we’re too far involved to stop. What do these children-now-become-adults think of when they hear the phrase “Blessed are the peacemakers?”

Maybe they’ll come to accept war the way other cultures accepted human sacrifice. Perhaps they’ll just accept it as a cost of existing: the gods, in this case weapons manufacturers, need to be appeased. Maybe they won’t see it at all, so detached from it as they are.

But just maybe they will see it with fresh eyes. Maybe more innocent eyes will see through the complex web of justifications we have spun for ourselves and see the incredible waste, horror, and immorality behind war. I’d like to think so. Somebody has to. For all the horror that war creates in the world today, it is but the birthing pains of the ultimate horror, one which we are marching closer to, our footsteps forward sounding with every explosion.

Nuclear war is every bit the threat it was in the cold war era, it’s just we don’t seem to worry about it, or even think about it much anymore. Once we had time for such matters but lately we’ve had other things on our mind: retirement investments, lawn care, and binge watching TV series on Netflix. We’ve gotten used to the possibility of nuclear annihilation, just as our children have gotten used to perpetual war.

So let us think no more about it and get back to matters more dear to our hearts. Let us return to Facebook and Fantasy Football. Let us shut out the world outside our window we can no more change than we can the weather. After all, there are new videogames to be played, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield. That’s an activity you can engage in with your child, a bonding experience. Or instead you can read a book, one of those post-apocalyptic ones that seem so popular these days. Don’t worry unduly about the children’s future, they’ll work it out, just like we did. What we don’t think about can’t hurt us, right?

Charlie Brown, Lucy, and War

I give Charlie Brown a lot of credit, he really tries hard to kick that ball. Granted he’s foolish for trusting Lucy to hold it for him when she’s lied to him EVERY SINGLE TIME, but he’s a trusting individual and he really wants to show what he can do.

And Lucy always has the best excuses. Well, maybe they’re not the best excuses, but they’re what Charlie Brown wants to hear.

All right, let’s face it, Lucy’s mean for constantly making Charlie Brown fall for the same old trick, and Charlie Brown is stupid for falling for it over and over. More than stupid, there is some egotism involved that urges Charlie Brown to believe her. There is something deep in his psyche that makes him want to believe.

But for all of Charlie Brown’s shortcomings, he is the one to pay for his folly. He comes charging up to kick the ball, Lucy pulls it away, and Charlie Brown falls flat on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Time after time. You’d think he’d learn, but he never does.

As George W. Bush once tried to say: fool me once, shame on you, full me twice, shame on me. At some point you have to stop feeling sorry for Charlie Brown, although you never have to stop blaming Lucy for her behavior. At some point Charlie Brown has to wise up. At some point you have to call him a blockhead for trusting someone who’s fooled him countless times.

Now imagine what we would think of Charlie Brown if each time he fell for Lucy’s prank, people died. Imagine if he went to kick that ball, Lucy pulled it away, and little children got blown into bloody chunks. How tolerant would we be of Charlie Brown then?

Because that’s what is happening, over and over again. Every time a nation gears up for war, it (Lucy) prepares its population (Charlie Brown) by telling it anything necessary to get it to go along.

There are many reading this who remember the Gulf Of Tonkin incident. It was an alleged attack on a U.S. ship by the North Vietnamese that President Johnson used as a pretext for escalating our involvement in Vietnam. Except it never happened. Lucy, dressed as Johnson, held the ball for us, the American public, and we charged. Only when she pulled the ball away 58,220 of us died, far more scarred for life by a war that shouldn’t have been. Oh, and if we count the suffering of non-Americans, a million men, women and children more died, a country defoliated, and generations of suffering ensued.

Fast forward to the First Gulf War. Babies were being ripped out of incubators and thrown to the floor to die, said Lucy, posing as a nurse who had actually witnessed such things. Except she wasn’t and it didn’t happen, but we all fell for it and fell flat on our back. Fortunately, few people died in the ensuing war, less than a hundred and fifty. Well, unless you count Iraqis, in which case tens of thousands died, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who died as a result of later sanctions, not to mention the deaths caused by depleted uranium used by us. But we don’t have to worry about depleted uranium, Lucy said so.

How about the time Lucy dressed up as Colin Powell and started talking about chemical labs being transported on trains and trucks around Iraq? Boy we sure were going to clobber the ball that time, weren’t we? We’ve gotten up and moved on from that incident but people are still killing and dying because of our naivete. What has it been, now, 14 years? It’s hard to keep track, especially since Lucy’s been keeping us occupied with her old games since then.

Remember Libya and how we were going to help them? This is what it looks like today.This is what happens when we let Lucy sweet talk us. Shame on you, Lucy, shame on us.

And yet we go on with our lives as though nothing has happened. And Lucy now holds the ball for us and somehow we’ve all forgotten our entire history with her. But it’s not cute and it’s not funny because people die. And while we try to pass the blame by saying it’s not our fault, we are responsible. Charlie Brown had issues, but they were almost endearing. We have issues and it’s costings millions of lives. It’s costing people their limbs and their health and their sanity. The billions of dollars we spend on war is money taken from those who do not have enough to eat, do not have a decent education. Hell, we can’t even afford drinking water for Flint. But Lucy is sweet-talking us, and what she says appeals to a weakness within us.

I’ll tell you what that weakness is. We are lazy cowards. Working for peace is hard work and can even be dangerous. Look what happened to Martin Luther King.  So instead we permit the government to make our decisions for us, so that we don’t have to be responsible. We fear in moments of crisis to stand alone against the herd and speak against the popular narrative. We wish to blend in, not make waves, or else shout loudly as one in the crowd. We prattle on about peace all the while acquiescing to the warmongers.

We don’t want a nation of the people, by the people, for the people, because then we the people might have to make adult decisions and that idea terrifies us. Better to listen to someone else, even if in our heart of hearts we know that that someone else is lying, has always lied.

This is the road that leads to fascism. Fascism is the bending of the individual’s will to the state, to power, to war. That is our fate if we do not choose our course for ourselves, if we continue to listen to the seductive lies Lucy speaks.

Governments don’t demand peace, people do. If we ever want peace, it’s up to us as human beings to create it. We cannot leave it up to our governments, because they will always insist the way to peace is through war. How many more times will we let the ball pulled away from us? Because when we fall flat on our back, people die.

The Dead Raccoon That Is Trumpcare

What The Failure Of Trumpcare Can Tell Us About What’s To Come

I believe President Trump made the best of a bad situation in withdrawing his healthcare proposal. Admitting that he lost is not something that comes easily for Trump, but distancing himself from a sure-fire disaster is second nature.

We’re finally getting a sense of what the Trump Presidency is like. Make bold promises, offer the moon, and then rely on others to carry out the hard work once the deal is agreed to. The promise on the campaign trail was to immediately repeal Obamacare, and replace it with something much better. Clearly, Donald Trump had no idea what that something better was, but he figured somebody in the senate was smart enough that they had been busily preparing for the moment when they might have a chance to repeal the ACA and replace it.

He was wrong. He left things in the hands of Paul Ryan, who was confident, articulate, and absolutely out of touch with reality. Trumpcare was in fact Ryancare, and Ryancare might just as well have been called Randcare (Rand as in Ayn, not Paul). Ryan’s idea was that if you were poor or you were sick that people like you should not burden people like Ryan’s opportunity to get Lasik eye surgery.

Now I don’t consider our government to be much of a democracy, but there are limits to what any government can get away with. Even brutal dictators have to show some semblance of concern for the poor and unfortunate. Even Adolf Hitler had to disguise what he had planned for the untermenschen.

So Trump/Ryan/Rand care was dead in the water. Rule number one that astute politicians learn is not to stand next to a dead raccoon or people might associate you with the stink. Given that the dead raccoon is sitting on top of his head, Trump was unable to distance himself from it. Fortunately Obama had a stinky raccoon of his own, and Trump was savvy enough to put that in front of the public’s nose and point to it as the cause of the stench.

Now Obama’s raccoon wasn’t quite dead, but it never was a very healthy animal. It was the spawn of a most unlikely coupling. In fact, there is good reason to believe that it was Mitt Romney and not Barak Obama who was the biological father. It doesn’t matter, it bore the Obama name, and therefore President Trump could never let it live. You see, Donald Trump can never tolerate anything that has the name of another man. He’s like the sultan in 1,001 Nights, who takes a virgin bride each night and has them beheaded in the morning before they can cheat on him. The thought of other males in his domain is unacceptable Trump is the alpha-male and any other who challenges him must be eliminated.

So with Trumpcare dead, it was best to shift attention to Obamacare. Let’s put aside for a moment all these health care plans mean something to sick people and even well people who are afraid of needing healthcare someday, because Donald Trump never cared about that end of things. Trump cared about scoring points with the voters and Obamacare was a vulnerable program. Still is, especially since the Republicans have done nothing to nurture it and everything to wound it. Again, let’s not worry about those people who are actually in need, let’s worry about scoring political points.

Donald Trump will let Obama’s lame child live, all the while tripping it whenever it walks by, depriving it of food and scaring off those who would try to help it out. Let it shamble weakly towards its grave, the whole while taunting it and by extension any other male who would attempt to put their name to something that is rightfully Trump’s. That’s what alpha-males do.

But here we have exposed Donald Trump’s weakness: his unending need to feed his ego. Here should be the game plan of Democrats going forward, to rename every proposal the Republicans put forth from here on out. Donald Trump comes up with a tax proposal that would reduce taxes for the wealthiest Americans? Call it The Ryan Code. Instantly Trump will lose all desire to support it. A new war in the Middle East? Call it McCain’s war if you want peace. This must be done for every plan President Trump comes up with, every single one. Except Trumpcare. Leave that stinky thing firmly perched atop the president’s head.

P.S. The raccoon in the picture is not dead, it is only sleeping. I would never post a picture of a dead raccoon.

What Is The Deep State?

What is the Deep State?

It’s the power behind the wars we fight.

It’s what’s pushing the anti-Trump DNC to the right of Trump.

It’s what wants term limits so that no elected politicians can have enough tenure, name recognition, or power to challenge it.

It’s what pushes for limited terms for leaders in other countries as well, for the same reasons.

It’s what encourages Democrats and Republicans to fight over insignificant issues that never come close to harming the deep state.

They either own the media or work for the same people who own the media.

They sponsor think tanks that refute the truth, or at least muddy it and those who attempt to speak it. The truth is a weapon that can be used against them, and so they work constantly to make sure you are always left wondering if you can believe anything at all.

It is the driving force behind policy regardless of whether our president or congress is Republican or Democrat. The same people are working behind the scenes. The same people.

It is the voice that calls for small government while it increasingly taxes you more, driving the government deeper in debt to the institutions owned by the deep state, and growing the areas of government you have no say over.

It is the force that demands cheap labor from overseas to drive down wages even as it points to immigrants as the source of all problems.

It is the people presidents keep their promises to even if they have to break their promises to voters.

It is the people who make money from the weapons we make, the wars we fight, the loans guaranteed by the government, and the prisoners we incarcerate. To them, nothing is sacred. They have learned to sell you water by the bottle and it will only be a matter of time before they charge you for the air you breath.

Truth matters, Your Simplistic Beliefs Do Not

We are in a post-truth world. Why? Because truth is no longer a priority for us. We’ve become so used to accepting lies that we no longer have the capacity for discerning what is real and what is fake, what has merit and what is without substance.

We live in a world in which spin is in the very air we breathe. We are bombarded by advertisement nearly every waking moment, and advertisement has no interest in giving an honest or balanced perspective. Though I am probably wrong, I can’t help thinking television has more ads than content, each ad pushing an agenda, an agenda which is not the pursuit of truth. And the programming itself must not in any way countermand the essential ideas the ads are pushing or else the advertisers will withhold their business.

Turn off the television. You will still be surrounded by the distortions of those trying to affect the way you perceive the world. Use your cell phone to Google something and you will be subject to advertisement, though most times you won’t recognize it as such. While you may be annoyed by the delays caused by ads on YouTube, you likely won’t even notice them when on Facebook.

Take a drive and try to unwind. The radio is there to sell you something, and it’s not appealing to your desire for truth and reason. Turn the radio off, you still can’t avoid the billboards, even though you may not be consciously aware of them. You think you’re not affected but they wouldn’t spend billions of dollars for access to your mind if they weren’t confident of achieving the intended result. While not interested in truth, they are very alert and in tune when it comes to return on investment.

Lies, spin, and distraction are the building blocks of our culture. Money and power warp truth the same way time and space are bent by gravity.

Facts are no longer pieces we assemble in order to build a better picture of the truth but instead are stones that we can load into our slingshot and fling at others. The idea of a greater, knowable and understandable truth has become a foreign concept to us. Our political discussions are no longer between two sides earnestly attempting to get to the truth but cheap theatrics or gladiatorial combat.

Why? Is it because we are the first generation to come to grips with the cold hard truth that reality is unknowable? Have all previous attempts to understand the world we live in been vain attempts by more naïve and less worldly societies than our own? I guess the answer would be yes for those who don’t wish to do the hard work of winnowing their way closer to truth and a firmer grasp on our world. It is the easy answer, the kind that helps us avoid making difficult choices and being in control of our lives. It’s much easier to accept what is given us by the propaganda machine and the politicians bought by moneyed interests that don’t have your best interests at heart.

Do we search for truth when it comes to politics nowadays or do we look to be persuaded by those who are telling us what we want to hear? Because what we want to hear is not the truth but the lies. Republicans just want to hear about the lies of the Democrats, and the Democrats just want to hear about the lies of the Republicans. And if you’re like me, you see the lies of both. But nobody seems to see the truth when it is spoken. Nobody’s interested in it. Who could stand the idea that no matter what side you’re on you still need input from the other side, you still need to balance your point of view with one different from your own? Simplicity, that’s what we want, and the best way to achieve that is to allow some authority to tell us what to think.

You see, if you start listening and not only listening but really looking for the truth in what the other side has to say, then you have to start living in a more complex world. Because while we can reach more closely towards truth than we are now doing, we never actually arrive at it. Truth is something bigger than can ever be stuffed inside our tiny little skulls. To seek truth is to have to admit we don’t know everything, that sometimes we have to add a third option between the true and the false, a holding stage where we keep ideas until we have further evidence. We would need to accept ambiguity, and in accepting ambiguity, we would need to accept intellectual humility.

Fundamentalism is a much easier way of seeing the world. Choose a simplistic idea and make your every observation be colored by it. Facts then no longer sting when you are hit by them. You simply choose the ones you wish and dismiss as lies those that cause discomfort.

And that is the point where we are now at. One side is incapable of listening to the other side because if they do they might be inconvenienced. They might be taken out of their comfort zone, forced to confront unpleasant and complex ideas to which there are no easy answers.

We’ve been doing it for a while now. And once you start down that path, once you start veering from the truth in favor of ideology, you get further and further from the truth. And the further from the truth you are the more you depend on your simplistic ideology to keep you feeling secure. It’s a vicious cycle that never ends well. It’s the same sort of magical thinking that a drug addict uses. Slowly they cut ties with those who tell them they are living in denial. They seek the company of other drug addicts, those who won’t tell them their behavior is destructive. They build around them a protective bubble for safety.

But such protection is illusory and temporary. Without a widespread foundation a tower will surely fall. Similarly, belief systems established on a single viewpoint will also come crashing to the ground. Trying to base your understanding of life on one point of view is like trying to sit on a one-legged stool. You need balance, you need perspective. You need to weigh one point of view with another.

Our fundamentalism, at least the fundamentalism practiced by those in places of power in society today, is capitalism and an actual religious belief in the “magic of the free market” to provide all of humanity’s needs. This fundamentalism requires us to disregard all the other foundations upon which societies have been built throughout history. Responsibility to others, civic duty, religious principles, they are either dismissed altogether, given mere lip service, or else twisted into some freakish semblance of their true shape in order to have them fit into the dominant, simplistic paradigm.

On some level we see through the lies we are told. We yet retain some memories of and appreciation for the morals and viewpoints we once held, that have been held by any healthy family, clan, community or society on the ascent. On some level we know we are living a lie. But the fear that results from our uncertainty when what we feel is so completely at odds with what we are being told tends to stifle us, or else it leads to reacting to the dissonance in unhealthy ways. Denial. Anger. Avoidance.

It is time to abandon the simplistic ideologies that lead us further and further from reality. It is time to tear through the curtain that we have placed over the window so we don’t have to face the truth. It may be unpleasant but it is the only way that will lead us from the dungeon of delusion in which we’ve been living. One way or another the truth will eventually come crashing through our cocoon of fantasy we’ve been spinning, it is best we make the choice to emerge from it on our own. Only in that way can we achieve the metamorphosis necessary to rise and meet our future.

For Those Who Fight, The Warriors

Courage, bravery, loyalty, honor. These are the traits we look for and admire in a soldier. It is a soldier’s duty to fight when they are told, to obey orders unquestioningly.

These are traits to be respected not only in a soldier, but traits many of the rest of us aspire to, though few of us achieve or have the opportunity to achieve them. But even those who do not fight must exhibit a certain degree of bravery and loyalty, especially when it comes to protecting those who have sacrificed so much for us. Let me make for you a bit of a comparison and see if it doesn’t make sense.

It is the job of a boxer’s corner to be looking out for him, to give him what he needs and to protect him from his own courage if need be. A courageous boxer, the kind that we most admire, will look to take on any opponent. A boxer in the ring against a determined and skilled opponent is the epitome of courage. He knows that he has to dig deep and that he has to be willing to risk it all, perhaps even his life. Any boxer who’s been around for a while knows the risks involved. He knows about brain damage, Parkinson’s, the fact that all his efforts have very little chance of any real reward or glory. And yet the fighter fights on, driven by some deep pride and a need to show his true metal. Someone who has proven himself within the squared circle is a man without anything hidden in his character.

But all the courage a boxer has must be tempered by those in his corner, those who are on his team and whose job it is to look out for him. Theirs is the task of encouraging him when he needs to go the extra mile but their job also is to make sure his courage does not lead him to make bad decisions.

It’s an old story, the boxer who’s seen too many fights and gets used by those around him. Unscrupulous fight promoters and greedy managers send brave men into the ring when they have no business being there.

It’s the same thing with a soldier, really. There are those willing to put the soldier’s life on the line for their own personal gain. There are those who will ask everything of a fighter and when he’s given his all will turn his back on him while counting the profits they’ve made from a warrior’s sweat and blood. You see, as far as they’re concerned, there’s always another brave young man willing to take his place, desiring to prove his quality and his bravery. Courage and the desire to test one’s greatness are in no shortage in the human race, something for which we can all be thankful. But the willingness to profit off the labor and sacrifice of others is also deeply imbedded in the human race, something we must always be watchful of.

Lots of people who’ve never fought a round themselves make a lot of money on the fight game, leaving many of those who do the work penniless and broken for their efforts. It’s a sucker’s game but the fighter goes into it with the best of intentions. Most are noble people looking to better themselves, looking to take care of their family and loved ones.

I’ve been a fight fan all my life. I’ve seen guys show unbelievable strength in the ring, guys fighting for little more than pride. God help me, I’ve seen men die in the ring. And in some small way I can’t help feeling responsible for them.

I’ve cheered men on in a brutal sport. I’ve encouraged others to watch, hell, I’ve even wanted to be a fighter myself. Like so many others I wanted to know what I was made of, wanted to know if I could take the best the world or another man could throw at me.

But I’ve seen enough. I no longer feel good about asking others to step into the ring for my sake. I have come to feel personally responsible for a sport I believe does more harm than good. I won’t ask someone not to test their courage, because that is their decision to make. But I will not encourage the sport. I will not pay money to some ruthless promoter to make a fight happen. I’ve seen too many valiant warriors be allowed to push themselves beyond where they ever should have gone, who fought too many fights and received too much punishment. And while I salute their courage, I will no longer allow my own interests to overtake theirs. I will no longer bask in the reflected courage of another but will instead try to be brave in my own right, and for me that means to look out for their interests when others are trying to make a buck off of their sacrifices, to stand up and make a scene if necessary when brutality is nothing more than a money-making scheme.

The same with our fighting men and women. It’s easy to stand behind them as they walk off to battle. There is no bravery in that, no bravery in asking others to do what you will not. It is harder to stand in front, to put oneself in harm’s way between two opposing warriors about to prove their bravery while rich men get richer off them. And while I don’t ever expect to put an end to the fight business, I myself promise to stop watching war as a spectator sport. Because while I’ve never been a warrior myself, I do have some idea what it is like to feel the need to prove yourself in a game you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. I know to a degree the kind of life that leads people to want to prove themselves in ways that the wealthy and fortunate seldom choose. And while my courage in opposing the game will never equal those who partake in it, perhaps exhibiting some courage myself might lessen the need somewhat for courage in those who fight. We owe them that much. Because too often, while it takes a brave man to go to war, it merely requires a nation of cowards to send him.