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It's peaceful here in my backyard. The crows sound happy with warm October sunlight. I just read about a deadly gathering in Las Vegas. Absence of sun-drenched peace. Inconvenient this time of lost loss. Death is always inconvenient, even when invited. A veteran, about my age, this shooter. It took more than one to hold and fire this mental illness rifle. In a sad and guilty complicit sense, we have collectively achieved what we bought and sold and settled for. This malformed soldier is a remnant of what most believed we needed to create, back in the 60s, brainwashed into believing we were protecting wives and kids, somehow by killing Vietnamese husbands and many times their wives and napalmed children, trees, forest. Not exactly breeding ground for growing healthy minds and well-armed bodies. I dimly and darkly recall a much earlier disagreement with the new commander of the U.S. Navy's Officers Candidate School. A first woman commandant, something atrociously surprising to men-only militia violence, similar to Medea planning an angry hostile life. This earlier time also started peacefully alone, but inside, waiting to be called in to her office, at the beginning of her second week in her new exalted position over new violence-empowered candidates. I had just completed a gratuitous violence first week of abuse and militarily precise neglect, as ruthlessly systematic as white privilege, in frigid first week of January, Rhode Island. We were so close to the Atlantic it felt like we were in iced ocean. We had also been frigidly outside, and hotly inside, yelled at, systematically starved, force marched in gusty zero-degree 3 AM darkness without coats or hats or gloves, in fact I think we were in our boxers and Tshirts one night, due to someone's sin of omission, whether contrived on schedule or spontaneously erupting from pneumonia reduced and disabled minds, I do not know. The hardest part for me was less than two hours sleep per night. Industrially guaranteed to reduce oneself to crazy. When I was first ushered in for my early exit interview by none other than her Military Medea Mightiness, she took one look at miserably civilian dressed me and asked why would I think it appropriate to disrespect her by not bothering to show up in uniform. I started to mention that I had never been issued one when she told my keeper that we needed to do an about face and try again when I looked right. Or at least as righter as I might become. So, he had to go out among my now-former classmates to beg and borrow, hopefully he didn't steal, boots and belts and pants and shirt and hat. Later that same long and tedious day I was once again summoned for a second shoot. She wanted to know why I thought it was OK to be the first to go from this new class of officer candidates. Did my recruiter not explain about this first hazing week? Well no, in fact I thought he told me hazing is illegal in most States. We develop soldiers; we don't grow bullies. I understand you didn't make a total ass of yourself. So if you want to change your mind, now that we turned the heat back on and keep the lights off all night and have turned the verbal abuse down a notch, or maybe two, I might be willing to listen if you beg me nicely to stay here with us in Navy Officer Paradise. No thanks, said I, I'm already quite disgusted enough by your shocking lack of even militarized intelligence to see this as a navy not invested in preserving, much less protecting, real live humanity hanging onto some semblance of sanity. Oh but you see this is not true. Our rules of first week operationalization are to save your sorry ass because, as we all know, teamwork builds through ego assassinations. Well no, actually, your own recent research on these issues lies at my fingertips. Required reading for psych and communication majors, attitude change and persuasion students where I hail from in Michigan. It is a clear and present common threat to survival that most quickly grows cooperative trust and teamwork, cooperative co-investments, especially among those who have learned to trust and respect each other, including for our recognized and understood and appreciated diversity of talents. and shared sufficient simplicity of sleep and active co-listening for harmonic voices. Or maybe that was just for choirs and military orchestras. Well this is fake news to me! she exclaimed in her sternly patriotic face. I believe you, which is why I want out of this absence of healthy care and any semblance of sanity, disloyal to my family's investment, my nation's rational self-governing future, and anathema to Sacred Mother Earth. Are you Native American, asked she, as if she couldn't care less or more. No more or less than you I would surmise. It came as no surprise when she eagerly accepted my request to be relieved of further dishonored service and cast aside my various borrowed parts because of ecopolitical leaders confusing noble grace of unity with bare-knuckled bare-headed frozen uniformity. I wonder how the Green Beret shooter in lost loss of Las Vegas might have suffered from this same sad loss of militarized teamwork disabilitization, chronic and critical climates of constant stress. When the enemy is down and out of sight, we cannot afford to have disaffected grunts sit on angry-fearfilled butts rethinking who is truly in my ego team's best interest and whom we might agree to take out next, because healthy mental care giving and receiving has nothing to do with formation of militarizing violence. In this same way, a Presidential God Bless You, twittered to victims of our own militarizing violent formations, feels so empty, fake as the blesser would do even lesser mental health care and receiving for all God's militarizing and industrious We Win So You Must Lose soldier candidates in deformation, but also neglected children and trees, and starlight which could bring us together in one mind of great thanksgiving.
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