Epiphany - - of sorts

I had an epiphany of sorts over the weekend.  As some of you may know, for the last several weeks there has been an ongoing exchange in the letter’s to the editor of the Aberdeen, Daily World over a letter I wrote back in December 2008.  In that letter I criticized, among other things, the grooming of our children for militarism in the public schools.  In one response, a letter writer suggested that I had a defective conscience or worse, probably no conscience at all.  Ouch!  Another writer, a man who stalked me several years ago when I first moved here, used classic Red Baiting techniques by calling me a Communist, a Socialist and a Bolshevik.  That was not exactly correct: 

1.  the Communists kicked me out of their party after a very short time - - they said I was too radical;

2.  I was never a Bolshevik although Alexander Cockburn has, on occasion, called me a Bolshi Scum; and

3.  I’m no Bush neo-Socialist!  I’m a classic, paleo-Marxist Socialist.  W has certainly given classic Socialists a bad name what with his bailout of the capitalist system.  But that’s another commentary.

 

Now, those acute criticisms of my letters have had a profound effect on my thinking so I’d like to change my mind.  The change occurred when I read that several of our legislators, including our own Lynn Kessler, have decided to protect our children in the schools from grooming.  Not from the grooming that would turn them into killers or cannon fodder that I criticized, but save them from adult sex with the wrong, other adult people.  Let them enter into a contract, let them vote, let them kill for God and country but by Jehovah or Allah or whatever, don’t let them engage in consensual, adult sex. 

What a fool I was.

I have decided to support American militarism and empire.   In that spirit I offer a program that might heal the rift between me and my critics.

 

I now realize that we are waiting far too long to indoctrinate our children.   Let’s rename our area from Grays Harbor to Sparta.  Like Sparta we must take the children, boys and girls, away from their indulgent parents at an early age, say five or six, and begin their rigorous military training.  This would have many advantages, not the least of which would be to alleviate the need for all those teachers of music and reading and writing and English and social studies and others who don’t teach the manly virtues.  We could have military bases in every community instead of those useless schools - -  that would ensure lots of Congressional earmarks from Norm Dicks.  We would no longer have over a hundred homeless teenagers to worry about every week.  No more worries about the 25% of girls who are physically, emotionally or sexually abused by their parents before they reach the age of eighteen.  Naturally we would re-institute the draft and conscript all teenagers at age eighteen - - oops, I mean thirteen.  No more worry about teachers and students having sex as long as we make sure that no military trainers are also Catholic priests.  At any rate, it would all be a military secret so out of sight out of mind. 

 

We might also be able to save the social security system with my plan because having conscripted every teen in the country, many of whom would die in the process, never to reach sixty-five, we could invade a much wider range of countries of little brown people who don’t adhere to our religion or refuse to give us our oil.   

I can see now how wrong I used to be.  I’m totally over my Communist, Socialist, Bolshevik phase and I hope my critics can now see that I’m really trying to come to grips with my defective conscience or the probably that I have no conscience at all.

posted by Gary Murrell's What's Left @ 1:21 PM