humanity – empathy = parasite

Originally I joined to get a bit of money for school, some discipline so I didn’t piss away the opportunity to learn, and some self confidence. I had gone quite a long way towards fucking up my life before I joined the Army. Not reaching my potential like my counselors warned was the least of my transgressions. But at least I was wise enough to know I needed to get the fuck out of Dodge if I was gonna turn shit around. So I enlisted in the army as soon as I turned 17. I tried to join the Marines, first, like my Dad, but the recruiter did not like that I honestly answered when he asked if I had ever smoked dope. The army recruiter appreciated the honesty and helped me fill out a request for a waiver. Pretty stupid to start a new life with a lie.

Anyway, at my first duty station we had some of the best training I ever got that wasn’t real war. We also practiced combat deployments to Germany, where I toured the Berlin Wall and Dachau. First time I really knew how bad mankind sucked. Up til then, I thought maybe mostly they were good but I just had gotten shitty luck and made bad decisions with it. I thought I surrounded myself with my own fucked up reality. But in 1986, I realized that people might be good in small numbers, mankind as a whole was a piece of shit species.

I loved the Germans I knew. My kids are German. Their mother is German. Their granddad was friggin awesome and their Omi was one of the best women I had ever had the privilege to know. Helmut was a walking Wikipedia before there was internet. I loved them. And yet they had followed Hitler.

I loved the Russians I met, the ones I might have had to shoot. I loved the Iraqi people I met, both Shia and Sunni, as well as the Albanians, Greeks, Serbians, Slavs. But all we ever really did was swap out one brutal group of people for another. We didn’t make it better and most times we made it worse. And a lot of us died in the making. For what? Y’all voted away your fucking liberty because you were shitting your pants in fear and stirred up by a catchy country and western tune, while we were being shot at some place that neither welcomed us as liberators nor envied the freedoms we had at home.

Most of them didn’t give a shit about us until WE kicked in THEIR door.

Point is, no one is innocent. Point is people suck. But we can love them anyway. You can’t hate your enemy, or else you can’t ever put your weapon down even after the fight. The hate wins, and the war won’t ever be over. You need empathy to turn off the hate. And people without empathy are why people suck. People without empathy are why people followed Hitler. That is what the whole poem is about, the one about not speaking.

Your own grandma shouldn’t have to die for you to get what it probably feels like for someone to lose their grandma. But we can’t even do that. Because this lack of empathy has us so fragmented that some of y’all don’t even see the other side as human.

Fucking hatred has won. Feels like it is too late. Momentum is tough to stop.

I always wondered how it was possible for a whole country to have followed such a galactic fucktard as was Hitler. But at least he was pretty charismatic. Dude could tell a speech. I cannot in any way see the charisma of such a buffoon as y’all are following.

So I can see where the rest of the world will wonder just where the fuck we done lost our minds to.