Dear Reality

Dear Reality

By The Last Boy In Line
Thursday, January 31, 2019

Dear Reality:

Sincerely,

Remember Me

Remember Me

By Curtis Bennett
January 29, 2019

I was once the pride of this country,
The healthy, the young, the strong and brave,
Then I quickly became the acceptable casualty,
In my country’s undeclared war,
In the name of national interest,
A country where I was too young to vote.

I went because I was still too young,
To know any better,
Though others cleverly refused,
Or ran away to hide.

I never once dreamed my own government,
Would ever lie to its own people,
But I was mistaken and they did for years.

I fought their war in a hell for one year,
Then came home and found another hell,
Awaiting from the very people and country,
Who determined I go in the first place.

Then their war, suddenly became mine,
And I was the convenient scapegoat!

Today I am the broken bodies and minds,
Shunted off, out of sight, behind heavy doors,
Of VA hospitals and mental wards to die.

I am in wheel chairs and braces, in hospital beds;
I walk the streets; I wander the railroad tracks,
I sleep beneath the stars.

Dear War Criminals

Dear War Criminals

By The Last Boy In Line
Sunday, January 27, 2019

Dear War Criminals:

Sincerely,

Donald Trump Says Average of 20 Veterans Commit Suicide Daily

Donald Trump Says Average of 20 Veterans Commit Suicide Daily

By Sean Gorman
Politifact.com
January 25, 2019

Topping Donald Trump’s 10-point plan to help U.S. military
veterans is a pledge to improve their mental health services.

"A shocking 20 veterans are committing suicide each and every day,
especially our older veterans," the President said during a speech in
Virginia Beach, where he excoriated the Department of Veterans
Affairs and laid out reforms.

We wondered whether Trump’s sad suicide number is correct.

The VA examined about 55 million veterans records from 1979
through 2014.

It found that in 2014, the latest year for which figures are
available, that 7,403 veterans took their own lives, or an
average of about 20 veterans a day.

The count updates a much-cited VA estimate that an average
of 22 veterans killed themselves each day in 2010.

The VA always acknowledged that this old study was limited,
because it was based on veterans living in only 21 states.

Notably absent were California and Texas - two states with very
high veteran populations.

The new figure of 20 veteran suicides a day is based on records
from every state.

The VA said that 65 percent of veterans who took their own lives in
2014 were 50 or older, a finding that jibes with Trump’s statement
that the daily suicides especially pertained to "older veterans."

For context, it should be noted that 75 percent of the nation’s
veterans are 50 or older.

On the other hand, the VA found that younger veterans had the
highest rate of suicides.

Those ages 18 to 29 had a suicide rate of 77 per 100,000 in 2014.

Veterans ages 50 to 59, by comparison, had a rate of 39 per
100,000.

In all age groups, the VA found that the percentage of veterans
who take their lives was substantially higher than that of adults
who never served in the military.

The rate for non-veterans ages 18 to 29, for example,
was 12.8 per 100,000.

The rate for non-vets ages 50 to 59 was 18.6 per 100,000.

The 2014 suicide rate for all veterans was 35.3 per 100,000;
the rate for all adult non-vets was 15.2 per 100,000.

After adjusting for differences in age and gender, the VA concluded
that veterans have a 21 percent higher risk of suicide than non-
serving adults.

Is the situation improving?

During a July 7 news conference, VA officials were asked whether
their research shows that there has been improvement in the
veteran suicide problem, since the updated number, 20 deaths a
day, was lower than the previous estimate of 22.

David Shulkin, the VA’s undersecretary for health, said the
department doesn’t view the new number as a sign of progress.

Shulkin said the average number of daily suicides may decreasing
because the aging population of veterans also is waning.

He stressed, however, that the suicide rate for veterans was rising.

VA figures show that the veterans suicide rate actually has
increased 32 percent since 2001.

That compares with a 23 percent increase in the rate for non-vets
during the same period.

According to the new report, the suicide rate among veterans
who used VA services increased 8.8 percent since 2001, while
the rate among veterans who didn’t use those services increased
38.6 percent.

Critics have said focusing on the daily number of veteran suicides
is pointless and that attention should be fixed on examining the
veteran suicide rate and how it compares with the rest of the
country.

Shulkin, during the news conference, said the daily suicide rate
figure has become so "ingrained" in public conversation that the
VA decided to recalculate it to ensure it’s correct.

Our Ruling

President Trump said, "A shocking 20 veterans are committing
suicide each and every day, especially our older veterans."

His claim is supported by recent research by the VA and we rate
the statement True.

Dear Veterans

Dear Veterans

By The Last Boy In Line
Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Dear Veterans:

Sincerely,

To enlarge this image simply left click directly on the image 👌

"Beyond Vietnam"

"Beyond Vietnam"

By Stanford MLK Institute
Monday January 21, 2019

On 4 April 1967 Martin Luther King jr. delivered his seminal speech
at Riverside Church condemning the Vietnam War.

Declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King
described the war’s deleterious effects on both America’s poor and
Vietnamese peasants and insisted that it was morally imperative for
the United States to take radical steps to halt the war through
nonviolent means (King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 139).

King’s anti-war sentiments emerged publicly for the first time in
March 1965, when King declared that “millions of dollars can be
spent every day to hold troops in South Viet Nam and our country
cannot protect the rights of Negroes in Selma” (King, 9 March
1965).

King told reporters on Face the Nation that as a minister he had “a
prophetic function” and as “one greatly concerned about the need
for peace in our world and the survival of mankind, I must continue
to take a stand on this issue” (King, 29 August 1965).

In a version of the “Transformed Nonconformist” sermon given
in January 1966 at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King voiced his own
opposition to the Vietnam War, describing American aggression
as a violation of the 1954 Geneva Accord that promised self-
determination.

In early 1967 King stepped up his anti-war proclamations,
giving similar speeches in Los Angeles and Chicago.

The Los Angeles speech, called “The Casualties of the War in
Vietnam,” stressed the history of the conflict and argued that
American power should be “harnessed to the service of peace
and human beings, not an inhumane power [unleashed] against
defenseless people” (King, 25 February 1967).

On 4 April, accompanied by Amherst College Professor Henry
Commager, Union Theological Seminary President John Bennett,
and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, at an event sponsored by
Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, King spoke to over
3,000 at New York’s Riverside Church.

The speech was drafted from a collection of volunteers, including
Spelman professor Vincent Harding and Wesleyan professor John
Maguire.

King’s address emphasized his responsibility to the American people
and explained that conversations with young black men in the
ghettos reinforced his own commitment to nonviolence.

King followed with an historical sketch outlining Vietnam’s
devastation at the hands of “deadly Western arrogance,” noting,
“we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we
create a hell for the poor” (King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 146; 153).

To change course, King suggested a five point outline for stopping
the war, which included a call for a unilateral ceasefire.

To King, however, the Vietnam War was only the most pressing
symptom of American colonialism worldwide. King claimed that
America made “peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give
up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense
profits of overseas investments” (King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 157).

King urged instead “a radical revolution of values” emphasizing
love and justice rather than economic nationalism (King, “Beyond
Vietnam,” 157).

The immediate response to King’s speech was largely negative.

Both the Washington Post and New York Times published editorials
criticizing the speech, with the Post noting that King’s speech had
“diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his
people” through a simplistic and flawed view of the situation (“A
Tragedy,” 6 April 1967).

Similarly, both the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People and Ralph Bunche accused King of linking
two disparate issues, Vietnam and civil rights.

Despite public criticism, King continued to attack the Vietnam War
on both moral and economic grounds.

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/beyond-vietnam

Dear U.S. Military Industrial Complex

Dear U.S. Military Industrial Complex

By The Last Boy In Line
Saturday, January 19, 2018

Dear U.S. Military Industrial Complex:

Sincerely,

U.S. at War

U.S. at War

Infographic Reveals For The First Time That The U.S. Is Now
Operating In 40 Percent of The World’s Nations

By Smithsonian Magazine
Friday, January 18, 2019

Less than a month after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the
United States, U.S. troops—with support from British, Canadian,
French, German and Australian forces—invaded Afghanistan to fight
Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

More than 17 years later, the Global War on Terrorism initiated by
President George W. Bush is truly global, with Americans actively
engaged in "countering terrorism" in 80 nations on six continents.

This map is the most comprehensive depiction in civilian circles of
U.S. military and government anti-terrorist actions overseas in the
past two years.

To develop it, my colleagues and I at Brown University’s Costs
of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, along with Smithsonian magazine, combed through
U.S. and foreign government sources, published and unpublished
reports, military websites and geographical databases; we
contacted foreign embassies in the U.S. and the military’s
United States Africa Command; and we conducted interviews
with journalists, academics and others.

We found that, contrary to what most Americans believe, the
war on terror is not winding down—it has spread to more than
40 percent of the world’s countries.

The war isn’t being waged by the military alone, which has spent
$1.9 trillion fighting terrorism since 2001.

The State Department has spent $127 billion in the last 17 years to
train police, military and border patrol agents in many countries
and to develop anti-terrorism education programs, among other
activities.

Because we have been conservative in our selections, U.S. efforts
to combat terrorism abroad are likely more extensive than this map
shows.

Even so, the vast reach evident here may prompt Americans to ask
whether the war on terror has met its goals, and whether they are
worth the human and financial costs.

To enlarge this image simply left click directly on the image 👌

Dear Mother-In-Law

Dear Mother-In-Law

By The Last Boy In Line
Friday, January 11, 2019

Dear Mother-In-Law:

Sincerely,

Are We Fascist Yet?

Are We Fascist Yet?

By Dan Corjescu
Dissident Voice
January 9, 2019

To characterize modern day America as a fascist state is at one and
the same time both ahistorical and close to the present truth.

In order to resolve this apparent contradiction we must understand
that modern day fascism displays certain rough, jagged continuities
as well as discontinuities with its interwar past.

Operationally, fascism was, at least initially, an alliance between
ancien regime conservatives, socially and economically insecure
elements of the middle classes, and a significant fragment of
alienated, radicalized workers.

Ideologically what united these disparate groups was a utopian
belief in the nation as a higher structural unit uniquely suited
to the aims of both internal corporatist social organization and
external expansive force as expressed in high stakes international
conflict.

Looked at from this historical perspective, modern day American
fascism is a completely different beast.

Firstly, its general, overall class organization is vastly different.

Secondly, fascism in America is not primarily about specific
categories of class support at all, as it was for historical fascism.

Rather, the sources of American fascism are broadly structural,
class cutting, organizational, and have their ideological basis in
a faux or unserious, artificial belief in the nation.

Today’s American governing elites (Trump included) do not possess
a messianic or utopian belief in the nation or white race.

Here, as Marx once famously remarked, history first plays itself out
as tragedy then once again as farce.

Indeed, one would be hard pressed to imagine a more hyper-
farcical character than the current president.

For the elites, nationalism is long dead. It has no content.

It is an emotively reflexive phantom that haunts the financial flows
of present day capital.

However, it must be, from time to time, managed and utilized for
their (global elites) benefit much as an advertisement campaign is
used to sell a particular brand.

Thus, nationalism is, at best, a nostalgic brand name, not a fervent
faith. Hence, the comic-surreal quality surrounding its reappearance.

Also, unlike past Fascisms there is no current, specific group that is
marked out for total chiliastic destruction, rather certain groups
are administratively, if not always systematically, excluded from
national borders.

The flows of immigration become the main ideological target rather
than the immigrants themselves.

It is not that the immigrant is consistently held to be “intrinsically
evil” (despite some famous Trumpian comments about Mexicans)
but that his entrance to the national community must be regulated
and controlled.

This much is relatively uncontroversial.

Modern day Fascism does not overtly offer up a national elite whose
mission it is to violently eradicate a national, ethnic, or class
“other” nor does it embody a rabid expansionist foreign policy (on
the contrary it purports to look and turn inward).

At most there are weak echoes of the past here; modern civil
society is, after all, not as racist, xenophobic, or generally
intolerant as it was during the inter-war years and there is the
internationally tempering factor of atomic weapons to consider
as well.

Thus, if we are to look for current fascistic elements in society
we must look elsewhere.

Where modern day fascism does intersect with its past image and
practice is in the strict maintenance of absolutized hierarchy and
total surreptitious systems of domination.

By this we mean, that the US is an ingeniously hermetically sealed
vessel of elite control that expertly gives the appearance of
freedom, equality, and justice.

To be sure though, there is indeed a certain level of all three of
those highly desirable social and political goods in the society; far
more than in classical fascism.

However, the steerage of the system is in the hands of hidden
actors who are the de facto elites but have no need or desire to be
identified as such, since they too look primarily to enjoy the fruits
of a dynamically regulated civil society which nevertheless, and
crucially, does not, in the slightest, threaten their actual
dominance and elite status since it is unseen and thus publicly
unquantifiable.

Thus our fascism tends to lurk in the shadows; in the unseen spaces
where our well trained/conditioned eyes cannot see the markings
of hidden power, privilege, and control.

The trappings of democracy hang loosely over hardened structures
of domination that we can but dimly see.

https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/01/are-we-fascist-yet

Dear Make America Great Again

Dear Make America Great Again

By The Last Boy In Line
Friday, January 4, 2019

Dear Make America Great Again:

Sincerely,