Grateful For Being Diabetic

Note that our Great Nation decided to engage in two wars at roughly the same time we were peaking in our personal prosperity.

2001 - 2003. We were doing well. The future was bright; broadcasted over any time horizon you could imagine, it was bright. Energy was cheap. Unemployment was low. On the whole, we were doing well.

So under that prosperity we decided we could engage in a coupla wars...with expectations that they'd quickly run their course, the invaded nations would capitulate easily, and they'd open several hundred WalMarts & McDonalds in a few years' time and we'd never have to bomb/invade them ever again. Note that my Merika has never once invaded a nation with a McDonalds franchise.

Just suppose that Osama decided to launch his attacks in 2008 instead of 2001. What would you suppose our actions would have been?

I like to think about these straw proposals because what it does is highlight the lunacy of American culture. Do you think for a minute that we would now be considering a raid on Iraq had we been mired neck to nuts in a debt-based recession? No. We'd have taken a different approach, an approach I obviously can only speculate what might have been. But my guess is that that approach wouldn't have been 4,000+ soldiers lost, 75,000+ Iraqi's lost, and $2 trillion dollars pissed away enriching a handful of defense contractors and others of that ilk while lessening U.S. standing elsewheres.

So, in some sense, I view our current recession as the best damn thing to come along in a long time because if it hadn't, what other nation(s) would we have invaded to spread our ideals of freedom debt-based consumption? How many other nations' citizens would have died so that we could save a nickel on a gallon of gas?

This, coming from a former West Point cadet...a former Army officer. I no longer tow the line I was instructed to believe in, instructed to follow, instructed to indoctrinate others to follow. While our supposed God struck me down with juvenile diabetes, he also gave cause for the Army to discharge me...and while I don't wish this disease on anyone I am personally grateful to have contracted it because otherwise the last eight years of my life would have been engaged in one or both of these stupid fucking wars. Diabetes was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me.

Remember, I am cheering on a full scale depression, not for the bad that would invariably occur, but for the good that would come following it. We'd be a nation unwilling and unable to engage in wars of the affluent, and I think we would become a better people for it.