Let’s Have a War, a Real One

Because it was a while ago, and I was a little boy (okay a young boy, I was never little), I have vague flashes of memory about my grand-parents’ generation, AKA “The Greatest Generation,” and their relation to politics. These flashes of memory of them and their friends (most of whom were career military folks all retired out of March AFB) include some political conversations mostly in their kitchen over coffee and especially the VFW down on Alessandro Blvd. And, there were both democrats and republicans in the mix, and they argued politics but did so without hatred in their hearts towards one another and out of genuine love of country and wanting to see it improve. Later as I grew up, I began to read more, especially about politics and history, and there’s one general statement I can make about politicians and their relation to the Greatest Generation: the most sure fire way to blast your political career into a smoldering pile of ash was to let the merest hint out that you wanted to take even a sliver of the Medicare, Social Security and Veterans’ benefits that these people worked for and paid into their entire lives.

This generation was one of the most feared power blocks of voters in the country, and nobody in DC did anything to instigate their ire. Old people then, as they do now, hit the polls and vote, but back then they didn’t seem to vote against their own vested self-interests, especially out of some rancor and hatred toward a myriad of threats that have absolutely nothing to do with the funding of the big three safety net programs, two of which are funded separately from federal taxes collected. If that last statement is confusing to you, merely go get your last pay stub and note that fed, state and local taxes are in different categories and also note that Social Security and Medicare are also in different categories and slated to go into different funds separate from the general fund. My grand-parents’ generation seemed to understand this, but their spoiled hippy kids and everybody after that are getting more dim on the subject.

Maybe because grampy and grammy were part of the big team that banded together to beat the living shit out of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, and then were given good middle class jobs or even careers in the military that paid well and didn’t try to boot them before they hit the twenty year mark so as not to pay out a pension and save money on that end, they had a sense of camaraderie that went outside the defined lines of right and left when it came to getting paid their due. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that I don’t remember them sitting on their asses in front of the tube at all hours watching Faux News and getting wound up, like the present Boomer generation. Grandma had her two soaps during the day and some game shows and variety shows at night, but I mostly remember her cooking, canning, knitting while listening to music, and having coffee and conversations with her friends who would drop by. Grandpa had his coffee and paper in the morning, working his garden, wood working in the garage, and going to the VFW to hang with his buddies in the afternoon. I don’t remember a lot of fear and anger in them, but I do know their anger back then was feared by politicians who tip-toed very lightly around them and would never even consider trying to rob them of one red cent; I can’t say so much about their kids, grand-kids and beyond.

In the end, maybe it was because they had gone through such a historical threshing machine as the Great Depression as children followed by WWII in their late teens to twenties that built up this ironclad generational bond. The politicians of the days immediately following WWII knew the price to be paid for poking the bear with a stick, a giant grizzly bear of over ten million war vets, many of whom were technically mass murderers that were armed to the teeth. Previously, an even smaller number of WWI situational psychopaths nearly guaranteed the government would go the route of great social programs to stem the tide of the Great Depression because a real socialist/communist uprising was a possibility during that time period. The same would happen following the next giant war, in spades, as they liked to say back then.

Maybe what we need now is another one of those world wars to band the working class back together. We’ve already had our Great Recession, and we would have had another giant plague ala the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 except our CDC is too technically proficient and effective. As far as war is concerned, the problem we have today is the capacity to actually destroy the world in another global conflict. Nuclear weapons and M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction) have taken the big boys gloving up and hitting the ring off the table and only allowed for smaller proxy wars, many of which have happened and are happening today across the Middle East, Africa, South America and parts of Asia. So, we working class sit today in the perfect little angry stew pot picking at each other as the world gets carved up by an elite that can keep taking most of the pie for themselves and leaving a smaller slice for the rest of us without fear of the consequences of their actions. There isn’t a vast horde of actual trained killers bonded in a brotherhood of blood at the voting booths, just a ragged collection of self-absorbed tech junkies glued to their TVs, computers and smart-phones, keyboard warriors at best, and what’s to fear from that lot, even by going after their juicy Social Security fund to pay for the next tax cut to the wealthy?

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