— by Joseph Murphy —

My first thought upon reading the Orcas Issues article detailing the lavish all-day celebration of veterans on November 13 [at the public school district] was:

“Does this mean that on the next commemorative national holiday honored by our publicly-funded school district – that would be the Martin Luther King Jr Holiday on January 13 – will the OISD be restaging the Pettis Bridge Crossing, bring[ing] a few police dogs and overweight sadists to bear down on a blackface populace? Maybe ICE would hire out some agents for the day to give the festivities the real ring of authenticity by busting a few Mexican and Guatemalan heads”

Then I got angry.

Veteran’s Day, November 11, was instituted to remember the Doughboys who perished in the trenches for the fifteenth-century trade war fought with airplanes and mustard gas that was called WW I. Over there the Yanks proved their ability to fight for economic position with the rest of the world’s squalid capitalists.

And now, nearly a century later, my service-age son and his buddies of like age who have lived their entire lives under the shadow of America’s pillage crusades find themselves heartily disillusioned  with what is on offer. Good on them.

As a veteran of the 1960s who argued matters of war and peace each night over the dinner table with a Jesuit-trained attorney and who grew up next door to what is now the largest military base on the West coast –(Joint Base Lewis/McChord) that expanded early in the twentieth century by seizing treaty land from the Nisqually nation for those aforementioned doughboys.

As Thucydides put it some two millennia earlier: “The strong do what they can and the weak do as they must.“

Perhaps, but if we can’t do better than sentimentalize Uncle Billy and cousin Bob for their “service” in propping up the bottom line of Boeing and Northrup and General Dynamics while autocrats dismember journalists, hoarrders prosper and the air becomes unbreatheable while raising a generation of children who see through the chimera, then I am really not interested in participating in public rituals of death.

Especially on the public dime.

I gave my boy Howard Zinn’s masterful and truthful, “A Peoples History of the United States,” when he was nine. He put down the video game controller long enough to read it cover to cover.  No one will fool him about America’s wars.

I only wish as much could be said for the victims of Tuesday’s “K-12” extravaganza.

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