Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Chapter 19: A Melchziedek-trained priest’s views of one nation under guns domestic and foreign wars

Consider

Mark 10:13-16 
People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."

Consider:

Amendment 2, United State’s Constitution


A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to bear Arms shall not be infringed.


So, where is America’s well regulated Militia? Well, where is it? 


For sure, a regulated Militia is not in American schools, protecting school children and their teachers from being massacred. Nor is a regulated Militia on America’s border with Mexico, repelling the invasion of Mexicans and Central Americans? Nor was a well regulated Militia in the American Capitol on January 6, 2021, protecting US Congress members, while they certified the electoral votes that put Joe Biden in the White House. But then, perhaps the nearly all white horde that invaded the Capitol was the "well regulated Militia".


It being crystal clear that Texas and other states, and their police and sheriff departments, and their boards of education, and the US Government and its law enforcement branches are blatantly unable to save American school children and their teachers from being massacred in their schools, the onus falls on President Biden to use domestic American military forces to protect American school children and their teachers from domestic terrorists, and from people who refuse to require background checks that might prevent domestics terrorists from acquiring military knockoff weapons with large capacity magazines, designed only to kill people.


In view of the further obvious, that starting with the Vietnam war, every American foreign war was contrived by US presidents and powerful white corporate interests interested only in making more money (the Military Industrial Complex President Eisenhower warned against as he left his second term), it falls upon President Biden, as Commander-in-Chief of all US Armed Forces, to call home all America ground troops to  top the invasion from Mexico and Central America. 


The war in Ukraine is horrific, Valdimir Putin is a monster, but he is not killing American school children and their teachers, and he is not invading America from Mexico. It is Great Britain and Europe's job to help Ukraine. It is America's job to protect American children from American terrorists, and to stop the southern border invasion. 


As for America's foreign wars being contrived, let me back up. 


My father was a World War II Pacific Theater combat aviator. His B-29 squadron was stationed on Guam. Several nights a week, he navigated his B-29 to Japan and droped its bombs under heavy anti-aircraft fire. Then, he navigated his B-29 back to Guam. During one return trip, a prop flew off it’s engine housing housing and soared just above the body of his B-29 and fell harmlessly into the sea. Had the prop struck the body of his plane, it would have gone down in the Pacific, in the nighttime. Almost certain death for all aboard.


My father did not like the Vietnam War. He pulled strings to get my younger brother into the Alabama National Guard, so he would not be sent to Vietnam and die there, like two of my college fraternity brothers. I think quite a few influential white fathers were able to save their sons in that way,. A father named George H,.W. Bush got his son, George W. Bush, into the Montgomery, Alabama Air National Guard unit, from which he went A.W.O.L., but nothing ever came from it. The Bush family got rich off of oil. They were Republicans. The senior George Bush became President of the United States of America. Later, the junior George Bush became president.


Let me back up again.


in 1960, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, was elected President of the United States of America. After a while, JFK, as he was called, got cold feet about America becoming militarily involved in Vietnam, Not long after that, JFK was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, and Vice President Lyndon Banes Johnson, from Texas, became President of the United States of America. He was known as LBJ.


I saw LBJ promise on national TV that he would never send America boys to die in a war in Asia. Then, he  breached his promise. He sent a lot of America boys to die in Vietnam.


I was not one of them, because I got married in 1964, and by the time American boys were being drafted, married men were exempt. Also, I was in law school at Alabama, and students were not being drafted. My wife got pregnant and our son was born. By then, married men were being drafted, and students were, too, after graduation. But not fathers. 


My son died of sudden infant death syndrome, and I was exposed to the war draft. I waffled back and fprth between enlisting in the US Marine Corps and applying for a student deferment, which would get me drafted after I finished law school. I had one semester left. 


Finally, I drove to the Draft Board in Birmingham, my hometown, and signed papers for the student deferment. About a week later, my wife learned she was pregnant. I drove back to the Draft Board to try to undo the deferment I had elected. 


The woman who had taken my deferment application said she was really sorry my son had died, and that my wife now was pregnant, but the draft election was irrevocable. She walked over to a green filing cabinet and pulled out a manila file and brought it over to me at the counter. She opened the file, looked inside it, said there was some mistake. I had signed the wrong document, the draft election was void. I would have to apply again. I said, no thanks, I’ll go with a father deferment. I knew God had intervened. 


I drove home feeling as if the weight of the world had been lifted off me. Although, I was totally fucked up over my beautiful infant son dyingt sudenly. There is no way to imagine something like that, if it has not happened to you. 


So, I sort of know what is is like for parents whose children are killed at school. It is horrific. It is hell on earth. 


It looks to me that the Republicans have no intention of doing anything to save American school children from being killed by domestic terrorists with military-type weapons. That’s about as fucked up as something can get.


But I get way ahead of the Vietnam war story.


The American government dreamed up a false flag North Vietnam attack on a US Navy warship in the Gulf of Tonkin, which was used to justify America going to war in Vietnam.


Not long after Dr. Martin Luther King said the Vietnam war was a rich white man’s war and he opposed it, he was shot and killed in Memphis. Tennessee. 


President Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, who had diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis and saved a nuclear holacaust, had become a US Senator. Also a Democrat, Bobby was running for president. Moments after saying during a campaign speech in Los Angeles, California, that if he was elected, he would get America out of Vietnam, Bobby was shot and killed.


Malcom X came out against the Vietnam war, and he was shot and killed.


Muhammed Ali said no Vietcong had ever called him a nigger or threatened to harm him, and he was not going to fight them. He was put in prison and stripped of his boxing title.


President Johnson saw what had happened to the two Kennedys, Dr. King and Malcom X. Although he could run for another term, LBJ announced he would not seek reelection. 


Ameica was deeply divided over Vietnam. There was no middle ground. Anti-Vietnam war Americas were viewed as traitors by pro-war Americans. Up to my eyeballs in internal hell, I stayed out of it. 


My son had died shortly after his mother and I  argued violently about her taking him to her hometown to see her bother off to Thailand with the US Air Force, where he would service B-52s bombing Vietnam and Cambodia.


Richard Nixon, who had been President Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President, was elected on the promise that he had a secret plan to get America out of Vietnam. His secret plan was to beef up the South Vietnamese military, then run like hell. 


Flash forward to 1988. 


My father invited me to a Downtown Birmingham Rotary Club luncheon. That was the upper crust Rotary Club. I was not a member. 


The guest speaker was from the National Geographic. I think he was its Executive Director. His topic was “Getting to Know Our Neighbors.” He said studies had revealed 95 percent of American high school and college students could not locate Vietnam on a map. The Geographic believed getting to know about people in other countries might reduce going to war against them.


After the Geographic speaker finsihed, he asked if anyone had questions? A man asked if the Geographic had a position on Vietnam? 


The speaker said, the Geographic had correspondents in Saigon, when there was a huge street demonstration. The demonstrators carired signs, in English, begging America to save them. The demonstration was on all American TV stations. That shifted American sentiment from saying ot if it, to plunging in. 


The speaker said the Geographic's correspondents  interviewed many of the demonstrators, who did not speak English and did now know what was on the signs they carried. They said they lived in the countryside and had been paid money by the South Vietnamese government to get on buses and be taken into Saigon to demonstrate. The Georgraphic investigated and learned the money for the demonstration had come from American corporations and the US Government.


The Rotary meeting stopped breathing. My father and every one else in the audience looked like they wanted to throw up. My father said nothing during the rest of the meeting. We had ridden with me to the luncheon in my car. He said nothing during the ride back to where he had left his car. 


Flash forward to 2004, in the Unitairan church in Key West, where I attended a weekly afternoon “Seekers Group” meeting, led by the minister, who was from Tuscaloosa, where I had attended law school. About a dozen people  came to this meeting. We discussed various topics.


During a meeting, a fellow perhaps ten more years older than me said he was in the CIA in Vietnam. His unit's mission was to try to help Ho Chi Minh beat France, which once had owned Vietnam as a colony. France lost Vietnam to the Japanese during World War II, and was trying to get the colonly back, because of its rubber trees and other natural resources. Whereas, the American Government was publicaly supporting France, which lost Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh, with the CIA's help. 


The former CIA man said Ho wanted to do business with America, but America asked for too much. Not liking Red China, Ho made a deal with the Soviet Unition, whiich sent is military to Vietnam to help it fight Amerrica. The was was where the Soviet Untion and America battlefield tested their newest military hardware. Their troops were cannon fodder.


Flash forward to 1999. I met and lived for a while with a woman,  who had been a student at Kent State University, in Ohio. She and other Kent State students were sitting on the ground protesting America bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam war, which the American government had denied it was doing, but got caught in a lie. 


Ohio National Guardsmen ordered the protesting students to disperse. They didn’t disperse. The Guardsmen opened fire. My future lady friend and her friends, who were not shot, jumped up and fled, chased by firingGuardsmen. When the students veerred right, she veered left. The Guardsmen went after the rest of the students and she escapted. The Guardsmen got off. Dead and wounded students were … expendable?


Flash backward to 1990.


It was all over TV that Iraq’s army, ordered by Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussien, an American military ally against Iran, had invaded and taken part of Kuwait and its oil wells and refineries. Saddam and the first President George H.W. Bush knew each other, perhaps from when that Bush was Director of the CIA.


Not reported at that time was Saddam had polled the American ambassador re how America might feel about Iraq taking part Kuwait, which once upon a time had been part of Iraq. The Ambassador told Saddam that America had no position on that. Saddam invaded Kuwait.


President Bush started forming a coalition, which included America, Great Biritain, France and Saudi Arabia, to take Kuwait back from Saddam. Saudi Arabia would allow Coalition Forces to stage from Saudi Arabia. 


Ross Perot and President Bush were on Larry King Live. Perot said he had done business with Arabs and had gotten skinned every time, because they don’t think like Americans. So, he quit doing business with them. 


Perot said he had gone with paramilitary people he had hired to rescue employees of his company being held hostage by Muslims in the Middle East.


Perot said Arabs were always getting into disputes and wars, and they went into tents and came out arm in arm. That happened over and over again. It didn’t matter which Arabs controlled Kuwait, they would sell Kuwait's oil to America. 


Perot said he was a patriot, but invading Kuwait would not be worth one America military casualty. He begged President Bush not to rescue Kuwait.


Not long after, I saw Presient Bush say on National TV that he could not allow the American way of life ben threatened, The Coalition came together, and staged in Saudi Arabia, and drove Iraq out of Kuwait. Not to save Kuwait, but to secure its oil.


A Saudi prince named Osama bin Laden, had been an American ally in Afghanistan, which had defeated the Soviet Union, as Afghanistan once had defeated the British Empire. Osama was outraged that Saudi Arabia had allowed infidel troops to station in Islam’s most holy land, to fight another Muslim country, Iraq. Osama became America’s enemy.


Saddam felt he had been set up by his former friend, President Bush, and he tried to have President Bush killed. Tried.


During an early September 2001 night, Archangel Michael asked me in my sleep, “Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?” I woke up, wondered what that was about? I made the prayer.


Three days later, Steptember 11, I figured I knew why I had been asked to make the prayer. My concern was America would start another Vietnam-like war, but in the Middle East. It never occurred to me that America would start two such wars in the Middle East.


About a week later, as I walked out of a US Post Office, I sensed angels around me and heard, “America should get out of the Middle East altogether and let Islam and Israel work it out, or fight it out.


The second George Bush now was president. He and his Vice President Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton Industries,  sent American troops into Afghanistan, searching for Osama bin Laden. Halliburton stood to make huge sums of money from a war in Iraq. As did other large American corporations.


Bush and Cheney said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but there was no proof. Even so, America and its allies invaded Iraq and defeated Saddam Hussein’s army and later captured him, but no weapons of mass destruction ever were found. 


The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lasted longer than the Vietnam war, and ended about how the Vietnam war ended. America still has some troops in both countries, who could be home defending America from domestic terrorists who slaughter school children, and from Mexicans and Central Americans crossing America's brother with Mexico.


One year to the night after Michael asked me in my sleep if I would make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity, the same request was made again in my sleep. That time, though, I made the prayer for the Divine Intervention in my sleep and added to it, “And let it begin in me!”


Then, I was put through yet another fun course in mirrors, staring at myself, not liking what I wa seeing all that much.


Jesus in the Gospels said to first take the beam out of our own eye, then we will see clearly enough to help our brother remove the speck from his eye.


The next year, as I recall, I attended a Mechodist church on Sundays. The Sunday school teach was a member of a motorcycle club named “Bikers for Christ.” They rode around on weekends, talking about Jesus, I supposed.


During his Sunday school class, the teacher said he wished all Muslims were dead! He got lots of nods. I asked, what about Jesus saying turn the other cheek, love and do good to your enemies? The teacher said again, he wished all Muslims were dead. He got lots of nods.


Something grabbed ahold of me. I said very loud, “Don’t Christians read their own Bible?” Then, I said, in Genesis, God told Abraham that his younger son Issac’s seed would become a great nation, and his older son Ishmael’s seed also would become a great nation, which would cause Isaac’s seed trouble. If God prophesied that to Abraham, then who were they to want all Muslims dead?


They knew that Moses and Jesus had descended from Isaac, and Mohammed and Islam had escended from Ishmael. 


It was as they all stopped breathing.


This was a very patriotic church memvbership. Patrioism rivaled Jesus with them.


At a later time, I told the Sunday school class how I had been saved from fighting in Vietnam, which they all viewed as a righteous war. A man in the clase said of me, “He wasn’t supposed to go.”


Not that there was something wrong with the Vietnam war, but that I was not supposed to be in it.


Many Americas today would deeply resent my saying the Vietnam war was the work of the Devil. But that’s what it was. As were the Aghanistan and Iraq wars. 


As is the national and state and local goverments in America not protecting school children from being killed by domestic terrorists shooting them with weapons made for only one purpose: to kill human beings.


The KARMA from that is HUGE. Who knows? Perhaps the KARMA will cause every American that defended those guns being freely available, with no background checks, to suffer just as horribly as the massacred children, in this life, the afterlife, and/or a future life.


Why not? Didn’t Jesus say in the Gospels, “As you sow, so shall you reap”?


In 2010, I met a woman, who, after hearing from me how I was saved from Vietnam, said her husband’s mother had worked for the Birmingham Draft Board, and she’d heard quite a few stories of young men attached to that Draft Board not being inducted and sent to Vietnam, and she was sure her mother-in-law was the reason for it. I figured it was white young men, who got spared in that way. I didn’t figure young black men got that kind of preferential treatment back then.


I keep wondering why young black men and women join the US Military and fight rich white men's wars for dollar profit? I keep wondering if that is not a modern version of pickin' white men's cotton?


sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com



No comments:

Post a Comment

A sucker is born every minute: Trump's border wall

When presidential candidate Donald Trump, in 2015, raised defending America's southern border by building a border wall, I said, amen; d...