Today is Memorial Day, the day we honor our veterans, injured and dead. It is a day we should reflect on the efforts and sacrifices that these individuals and their families have given in the name of peace, liberty and freedom. It is a day we should put these people first and foremost in our thoughts and prayer but, also to reflect on the state we are in as a nation.
It is a particularly poignant day for me as it has been on my mind for the past week--and the question of rightness keeps coming to the fore of my thinking. What is right? Is it right for us to be in a military engagement with no end in sight? Is it right to be involved in a dynamic that the folks we are so sworn to help and protect are thinking about when they go on vacation? Is it right for us to have a President and his team so singular in their thinking? So unshakable and callous to the other side of the story, the feelings of a large majority of the people they are sworn to represent and protect are disregarded and spurned? Is it right to have families lose their children for a cause that cannot truly be defined? Is it right to be handing over lives and money for an unfathomable pretext, which we are told is democracy...but democracy on our terms? Is it right for us to impose our tenants and beliefs on a country that may not want them, may not understand them and may not culturally be able to get there? Is it right for us to be so right...throwing back to the days of the missions in this country apostatizing people for a church that is "right"? Is it right for us to have the military be one of the logical choices to get college aid so an individual can stretch to their fullest and be the person they can possibly be? What is right?
There are no right and wrongs here...and that is why I am confounded to think about the next presidency and leadership in this country. We are devoid of selfless leaders, those people who live and breathe aspirations and expectations for the bigger picture beyond the partisan politics that exist. I am tired of democrats and republicans who bicker and fight and frankly, differ by a whisker as their motivations stem from money and power and not truly transcending the ordinary. Our country is suffering. We have lost status in the world community as stupid, righteous brutes whose very arrogance is repellent. Our people are saddened and treated as a secondary people. Our educational system is dying as money and people are not being poured into it. We cannot afford to send our children to college. We cannot afford to clean up our world. We cannot afford to live cleaner and greener. This is not right.
The war must stop. We must halt this president and his inept team from their bullheaded righteousness, knowing better than 75% of the American people as to what is right. We must have leadership who has a positive vision and can implement it...independent of the philosophy of war, might and blood. We need a legal system lead by a pure person not a liar hiding in layers of stories, half truths and shameful behavior. We need a secretary of state who will talk to anyone and everyone for the better of our country and that of the world. We need a President who listens, measures, weighs and truly understands. No more of this. War makes more war, and we have, as Americans, set the stake for decades of strife and war in the middle east regardless of whether this war or skirmish is "won". We have stirred the hornet's nest without truly knowing what we do. And we will, and our children and their children will, pay the price for this arrogance and righteousness.
We must make noise, halt the money and pull back to see really what the situation is and move forward. This cycle of being right is wrong.