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I want to respond to the retired Marine who watched Democratic Congressional Leaders during the State of our crippled Union event, disappointed at how their patriotism, their loyalty to sacred sacrifices of soldiers appears too tepid, jaded, ungrateful as compared to more thunderous enthusiastic applause and standing ovations of Republican Leaders. I have noticed this too both during various national bipartisan rhetorical events, and also within my conscientious objector self, And I wonder about my own hesitation to celebrate military heroism, as if this were an oxymoron, like military peace intelligence. For me, such internal heart-warming applause is chilled by my own half-empty embarrassment that I have gone through my recent months and years perhaps too full of willing tolerance for moral assumptions too big to fail, That we are OK to predatively place other men and women, regardless of culture or religion or nationality, and their necessarily neglected children, in harms toxically unnecessary way. An heroic investment far too expensive for developing healthy persons, plants, or planet. This is not how we wisely invest in sacred Earth's climates and healthing cultures. My celebration of military heroes remains perennially muted by my unease about planting future threats by paying springtime federal taxes because I conscientiously object, for spiritual experience and religious belief reasons, how large the mountainous percentage invested in threat of death and dying and paying ever-mounting interest on past military industrialized deficits overheating budgets. Stolen from potential health and well-being of Earth's future generations spread throughout all Earth's sacred residents now terrified of upcoming ballistic climates. I should have tried harder, more conscientiously, to invest in restoring ballasts of co-operative climates. So, I intend no disrespect for courage and honor and heroes for those who have survived violence and fear and anger and greed and political pretensions of Elitists too old to fight themselves, but just rightwinged enough to invest in further armaments, and thereby profit nicely. I feel no disrespect for those who have not survived and will not survive, much less thrive in pathological death-culture. But nationalistic applause and praying for God's blessings on U.S. First and Last, Right or Wrong, feel consciousness unsettling when I experience God's applause for love and peace and not our hate and fear and anger and violence against each other, regardless of religion or culture or national origin or gender or color or age, born, long gone, or yet unborn. I know God too omnipotent and omnipresent to respect inhumane national apartheid boundaries. Heroes are those who have gone well past their patriotic duty far beyond what anyone could honestly and reasonably ask, beyond what most of us might expect of ourselves, Especially while those left behind remain in free-markets to profit off the tanks and submarines and rifles soldiers bravely carry, bullets and bombs they aim, often at the even more profitable investments of these same 1% Elite, regardless of International Conglomerate Status. For those who are persuaded what was asked was itself a positive democracy protecting moral act, standing ovations of buoyant applause feel resoundly called for from warmly celebrating hearts. But, for those of us who empathize with heroes both alive and dead regardless of religion or culture or national origin, who feel such violence reflects our own democracy protecting failures to conscientiously love all sacred life sufficiently, Such unmitigated happiness feels heart-wrenchingly wrong. In face of such selfless investment in violence and risk to healthy futures for threatening death and objectives of destruction, we more likely bow our disinvested heads, take a humbled knee, silent in awe of such uncompelling bad-breathed ambiguity, Yet not wanting to offend against such sacred gifts offered at an unacceptable cost We never had the conscientious right to ask another soul to pay. I do not believe disrespect is democratically intended for lack of con-celebrating our violent history's heroes; but respectful listening grows more conscientiously compelling for humility of political and economic enablers, co-investors like myself, with guilt and shame about what others have paid because we did not act sufficiently for waging and investing peace, Incarnating God's love for all Earth's SacredTribes.
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