Well, actually It was back in August.  At the time I told myself it was because I was going to school full-time and couldn’t work full-time AND go to school.  This was true.  This was also not the whole story.

Being a veteran, I have had the amazing opportunity to use the GI bill.  Currently, they will pay a living alotment and pay the tuition.  It’s a great deal.  I can actually go to school full-time, and if I manage my money tightly (very tightly), not have to work.  This is what I’ve been doing.

Unemployment in California is 12%.  Some people think I was completely crazy for quitting my job in the face of that.  I recently realized what made me send my boss a letter that fateful day back in August.  I felt guilty.  I felt guilty for having a job which I didn’t like, didn’t need, while there were lots of people who desperately needed work.  One guy I worked with did the job just because “he was bored”, his wife made over $250,000 a year.  That disgusted me. I could only see that as a selfish greed.  An arrogant, “I’m going to do whatever I want” attitude.  Those of you that know me might be laughing, because that was certainly my attitude in the Navy (sorry!!!), but I’ve come to realize that we have a responsibility as Americans.  A responsibility to pay debt (D’oh!), to help others, and to not be greedy.

I realized that it was my responsibility as a citizen of the United States of America, to do everything I could, to sacrifice what I could to help others.  No one forced me to do it, no one asked me to do it.  Hell, at the time, I don’t even think I realized why I was doing it.  I did it because I didn’t need it.  This was my sacrifice, opening up a decent-paying job for someone who would respect it and use it, someone who needed it.  I’m sure there were plenty of those people around.  Heck, mabye the guy that they hired as a temp got to be full-time, he certainly needed it.  And I didn’t.  I’m not trying to blow my own horn, as I said -I didn’t realize this at the time, but we all need to make sacrifices, and maybe I can sleep easier knowing that though I am a poor student, barely getting by (actually moving to Dallas, Tx because its much cheaper to live) maybe, just maybe, there is someone coming home from work every day, doing the job that I did, putting food on the table for his children.

Maybe.

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If you look at the recent military engagements around the world, most are completely ineffective.  Indeed, there have been many comparisons to Vietnam, Korea etc.  The fact of the matter is that fighting ideology cannot be done lightly.  Back in WWII there was this concept of “Collateral Damage” that is to say, civilian casualties.  We accepted this.  We didn’t like it, but it was understood as necessary to defeat the enemy.  It used to be widely held that in order to win, you must counter with at least equal force that the enemy attacks with.

We have grown morally over the last 60 years.  We need not look at wartime casualties to see the moralistic chain of events.  First civil rights, followed closely by womens’ rights, being debated currently is homosexual’s rights.  We are morally moving away from the time where we simply accepted casualties in war.

There seems to be an opinion that we should be able to win without losing a single soldier.  I’m not sure how this is possible, but every argument about the war has this undertone, -civilian death is unacceptable, civilian targets cannot be destroyed, etc.

How is a soldier in the field supposed to tell the difference between a civilian or an enemy?  By the time they start shooting it’ll be too late in many cases.  My father reminded me of something from the Vietnam era, when a 12 yr old child holds a rifle pointing at you, what do you do?  Do you kill him?  Did you just kill a soldier or a civilian?  A man or a child?  Are you a murderer?  My father is a hero to me, and he believed in “total war.”  Not only do you destroy the enemy (including collateral damage, after all, that’s the enemies fault), but you destroy their ability to make war.  Sort of like blasting them back to the stone age.

I disagree with this.  Conventionally, we cannot win wars anymore.  I firmly believe this, we have lost our dedication, or our old views on life that allowed us to morally justify the mass destruction necessary to win wars.  We cannot win when the enemy is willing to hide bombs on people and go into towns and detonate them.  Must we match force with force?  I’m not sure.  I am not, however, a person of non-action.

Propaganda, my friends.  Thought is the natural enemy of ideology.  Critical thinking and education destroys ideology faster than a bullet.  Now, I am not supposing that we should drop books on them, nor should we be completely unwilling to fight.  But we need to add a powerful non-violent weapon to our arsenal.  We need to find ways to infiltrate their lifestyle, ways to get the people over there to shed their narrow ideology.  This is not easy (HUGE understatement), however, often I find the right things are never easy.  We need to educate, we need to support the non-violent Muslims.  Just like the Catholic church has changed its stance on many topics with the advent of science (usually after torturing or burning the people who originally spread those “nasty” ideas.  RIP Galileo) there are many progressive Muslims who believe that the violence is wrong.  There are not enough bombs or bullets in the world to defeat religious ideology, but education, and ideas can certainly help.

We need to start finding ways to defeat the ideology from within.  And I know education is a start.

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Isn’t “assault” already illegal?

Yes, yes it is.

If you want to increase the punishment then increase the maximum assault/murder/whatever penalty under the law.  Any Judge or jury in the united states has the right to determine the punishment of the crime as defined in the law.  The whole, “not punishable by more than… etc” part.  If the Judge or jury feels the crime was more abhorrent for whatever reason, than he/she/they have the right to sentence the maximum jail time.  This new law serves absolutely no purpose.  This is just one in a series of “feel good” legislative bills passed for no other reason than, well, to make people “feel good.”  There is no easier way to feel good than to identify a group of people (must be a small, rather sadly looked-upon group) draft up some legislation, which is identical to laws that already exist, pass it, pat each other on the back, and congratulate each other on making people “feel good.”

Politicians could be accomplishing something practical, helpful, or at the very least not spending so much money, but no, next year’s election is rapidly approaching and the realization that nothing has been accomplished is right behind.  So here is the legislation which they can point to when asked what they did the advance the rights of minority groups, “Well, we made it MORE illegal to assault people based on gender.”

More illegal.

I’ll say it again (even though its my quote).  More illegal.

All crimes are illegal.  But some crimes are more illegal than others…

I know I’ve heard that somewhere.  But never mind.  This is the kind of utter nonsense and waste that comes out of Washington D.C. that quasi-democrats like myself really hate.  HAT-I guess I better not use that word, speech hasn’t been free for quite some time and I don’t want to find myself in jail.  There are many things in the world that bother me: religious intolerance, famine, disease, poverty, marginalization of human life, but the three things that REALLY bother me, and I hope bother most Americans, are Redundancy, Rhetoric, and Waste.

We see right through you, Washington, don’t think for one second that you’re off the hook.  You want my vote?  Earn it.  And dangling a piece of “feel good” nonsense in front of my face isn’t going to do it.

-Matthew

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