Memorial Day Weekend

The Memorial Weekend of 2003 is now over and past. I hope you all enjoyed your weekend as I did. I was graced by a visit from Kristin as she stayed the weekend at my place. I’m still having a hard time adjusting to only being able to talk to her via phone or IM or email instead of getting to see her pretty much whenever I would want as I did up at college. It’s kind of that way with a lot of people. I don’t really get to see that many people now during summer with my job for 8 hours a day and then improv three days a week at night. This leaves me with only Monday nights, Wednesday nights, and the weekends open. Usually during those times I just want to sit back and relax with a good book or just hang out with my family.

Speaking of family, at the cemetery after our memorial day service I got to talking with my grandpa Bill about politics again. He doesn’t think that I appreciate the military and all of the people who died for our country because I am constantly criticizing our country. The fact of the matter is, I wholeheartedly respect all of our fallen brethren because they have fought for the freedom we have now, however, I will never actually fight for this country myself. Why? There are a few reasons.

First, I would not fight for the United States right now because I detest our foreign policy. Our war with Iraq, our involvement with Israel, our blatant disdain for the UN, and many other questionable actions by our nation have made me lose faith in our foreign policy. We are sticking our noses where they don’t belong and are acting in a way that I only envisioned a playground bully acting. If things aren’t how we like them, then we’re going to go make them how we want them. I’m not saying we should back out of all of our foreign affairs, but we really need to take stock about what we are doing and what our true motivations are.

Second, I would likely fight for the United States in a war if it wasn’t 2003. If it was 1943, I would probably not have as much of a problem being drafted because back then we were fighting the good fight. Now we are fighting the “good” fight. It’s not really the good fight anymore as it is more the “good for the US” fight. We try to make our actions look altruistic, but it is so hard for our true motives to not show through when you actually look at the news from a source outside of CNN and other US sources. They sanitize the world’s views about us so that we don’t feel bad about how we act, which is a shame, but it is not unexpected.

Lastly, I am a pacifist at heart. I really don’t believe in the concept of violence being used as a problem solving technique. Needless to say, though, I have tried violence as a problem solver with my brothers, but beyond that I don’t think it should be used. It only creates more strife instead of solving conflicts. Sure, a lot of times people won’t listen to what you have to say, but that doesn’t mean that a violent recourse is the only way to then get heard. Maybe we just need to be a little more persuasive in our negations in life. Even if that does not work, I still don’t think that violence is really a good way to solve problems.