State of the Union

What lies ahead as energy continues to get more expensive.

This New York Times article on the rising demand for college degrees to gain an employment opportunity prompted these thoughts...

Education used to be about teaching people how to think. Now we teach how to do. These computer clickers our schools are churning out now, however, are practically void of logic or problem solving skills because they've never learned to analyze or think critically.

Look at Texas: they even wanted to keep critical thinking out of schools because it "taught kids to challenge traditional structures and authorities."

Then we have the "leave no child behind" initiatives which have just made our schools holding pins for idiots until they turn 18. We've seen the results of this policy: graduation classes that can barely read the road signs on their way towards mediocrity.

So yes, there may be more degrees floating around, but people are dumber--even with all their access to the internet. It's obvious why businesses want a college degree at a minimum!

This whole overpriced education can be seen a ploy to keep us indebted. The younger generations are being neutered. Public education gets gutted while the capitalist scheme continues funneling the wealth, wages, and time of people who actually work and produce goods and services upward to the mega-rich. The whole world knows it: England, Germany, France, Australia... they're all wondering what the policy makers in this country are doing. Are the business interests in Washington and the politicians they fund trying to destroy this country, or just get their hands on as much of the good stuff so long as it's available?

What we've witnessing is the collapse of our hydrocarbon economy because we're running out of cheep sources of oil. Gas prices will never go down by the degree they have in the past. Energy will continue to become more expensive. As Saudi Arabia's oil wells shrivel, we're being forced to "find our own energy."

Racists love this because it means America will finally be able to give Arabs a big middle finger as that area of the world runs out of its economic base, thereby engendering an endless supply of disfranchised terrorist that those racists can then go out and find with their guns.

But where are we looking for "our own energy?" It's ain't easy to find. Look: Alberta Tar Sands; Hydraulic-Fracturing; and as Climate Change continues to melt the ice caps and glaciers, deep see Arctic drilling. All these sources have a capture ratio of like 1 to 2. It takes essentially a barrel of oil to make two with these hard to get sources of oil. The sweet crude we've been running our economy on hyper-drive for the last century had a ratio of 1 to 10.0 So there may be much more oil out there, but not really because it take oil to make oil. And now it's starting to take 9 times more oil than what our economy has been used to.

The point is: we're running out of energy, the economy will continue to slow, and the rich know it. They also know these new techniques for getting oil require TREMENDOUS AMOUNTS OF WATER. It's really crazy. We're already running low on water and snow packs melt earlier in the year. And it also requires chemicals. Freaky chemicals that then get into our already diminishing sources of water just so we can continue to commute 50 to 100 miles to work from the suburbs.

The rich know all this. They're not stupid. They know resources are running low, and they're grabbing what they can before the whole ecological, social, and economic system we've not been stewarding collapses. Collapses completely--like fall of the Roman Empire dark ages for the next thousand years type of collapse. It's happened before. It happens all the time, in fact, throughout history: civilizations rise and fall. Fact. It may take 100 years for this all to play out, but things will start getting unhemmed in about 50.

People have always predicted it in the past, yes, but then we find another source of cheep oil. This will never be the case again. With space-aged advanced remote sensing techniques that utilize electro-magnetic imagery and a bunch of other super-physics things most people know barely anything about, we've already mapped out every last drop of oil on the planet--and there's like 40 years of it left. We've essentially used up half of all the good stuff, and there's more people on the planet now, stretching our reveres even more.   

So what's gonna happen? I predict we'll just enter another feudal age after we run out of oil. This neo-feudal world will controlled by essentially the same people who control stuff now. They're currently in the process of amassing resources and private armies and security forces to enforce their will when the time comes. The initial phases of the collapse will be crazy, though. Billions will die because the only way we're currently feeding billions is with cheep oil. The government will collapse or just cease to be relevant after we reach 50% unemployment and 80% food insecurity. Drought, famine, all that stuff.  It's not fiction; these things are already happening. Corn crops are getting scorched in the summer while the east coast gets ripped to shreds by storms in the winter. The money is running out to continually rebuild.

You can infer the rest. Feudal lords. They will put the rest of us to work in the fields. And they'll war with each other and we'll have to fight their wars like we have in the past and continue to do today.

The one thing that is historically unprecedented is this oil and the boom it gave us: humanity will never ever again enjoy such an energy source: the energy source that makes this type of world possible.

The technological arguments also hold little weight and have been considered. The bottom line is: solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are all impossible from an energy balance standpoint without oil. They are nothing but auxiliary energy sources, dependent upon oil.

Why aren't people hearing this and taking it seriously? Crappy educations and television. Television has done a great job in taking a nation of enlightened thinkers and turning them into the zombies only fictional horror movies have been portraying as fantasies rather than the actuality that becoming of us.

Most of us will be fine, though.  Like analysts have said, it'll be 40 years before we start running out.

THIS IS NO REASON TO BE FATALISTIC, however. There are things we can and should do from a policy and management perspective that will prepare for this collapse--although billions will die, no matter what, it's better than the whole world snuffing it. Mainly, government and the private sector can invest is sustainable infrastructure such as walkable cities while teaching communities how to be more self-reliant such as supporting local farmers who can maintain short supply chains. 

There is hope. The one thing there is not is an infinite supply of oil.

You can read more about this by checking out James Howard Kunstler's book, The Long Emergency.

I Wanna Be Like You!

This calculator will tell you how many years you'll have to work to enter the class of the 1%.

Above you'll see the easy to use calculator designed for giving you an idea of just how rich the 1% really are. Simply type in the net worth of a certain celebrity and then double click where it says #VALUE!. You'll see the number 45,000, which is the average American's earnings in a year. Type in your earnings and see how many years it'd take you to reach the heights of the 1%.

Democracy is for People

Democracy is for People is out to take the "For Sale" sign off our nation's Capital.

Currently, less that 1% of American citizens give 99% of all political campaign contributions. Charles “Buddy” Roemer, former Governor of Louisiana, pointed out this fact at a Senate Judiciary committee hearing a few days ago. This recent phenomenon reaps disastrous consequences on our democracy by stealing the voice of common Americans.

This is the issue: we have an entrenched problem with political corruption and the monopolization of political speech in America. And the statistic above is by no means the only glaring indication of this fact. There are many more to follow.

Our county's constitutional and legal decisions tackled corruption and monopolization in the past in order to protect American citizens from the ills that arise when they become prevalent in business and politics. Examples include child labor, price fixing, political kickbacks, discrimination, no-bid contracts, and practically every other issue that gets people pissed off an in the streets with signs and billboards declaring end "this" or end "that".

We've come a long way, and our Founding Fathers would be proud. The bad new is that two recent Supreme Court decisions vastly swept many of the rules that previously protected us from political corruption and speech monopolization into the dustbin, undermining the very foundation of American democracy. 

This is the backgroung: Citizens United v. FEC removed the ban on independent political spending by corporations, labor unions, and non-profits in elections. Speechnow.org v. FEC removed the limits on money that political action committees or PACs could accept from individuals, heralding the era of Super PACs. They are Super because there are now no limits to the contributions they can receive.

Democracy's light still shines, however. Thanks to those pesky activists and organizations that are always inconveniencing us with calls and soliciting our support on street corners, we may eventually be saved from having to witness our democracy devolve around us.

Public Citizen is one of those activist organizations, and their Democracy is for People campaign has been fighting to overturn Citizens United. So far, the campaign is ablaze, and many out here in the sweltering 100 degree Washington D.C. heat might attribute it to the summer climate, but the fact is that the issue of unlimited corporate spending in our elections makes everyone's blood boil, no matter what the season.

Boxes containing 1.98 million signatures at the Senate Hearing

Apart from the 1.98 million signatures collected by various non-profits working on overturning Citizens United, the endorsements of 6 state legislators and over 90 members of Congress, the most recent victory the movement has enjoyed came on Tuesday when a Senate hearing was convened by the Judiciary Committee to formally acknowledge the issue and place it on the political agenda--which is, of course, the first step toward real change.

The committee hearing opened up with Senator Durbin presiding. These are the facts he delivered: 

• After Citizens United secret spending sky rocketed from 1% to 40% of political campaign spending 
• Half of all Super PAC money is coming from just 22 people
• Super PACs have purchased practically every last minute of available election time advertising 

Give these realities, Durbin concluded that transparency has been eroded. "They have a right to be heard," Durbin said of the Super PACs, "but they do not have the right to be the only ones heard." 

Senator Bernard Sanders delivered some facts about wealth disparities and how the power of the rich influence politics in America. "Economically the United States today has by far the most unequal distribution of wealth income of any major country on earth," he said, "and that inequality is worse today than it was anytime since the late 1920s." The Walton family of Wal-Mart fame, of example owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of the American people, he said.

His conclusion is that Citizens United tells the billionaires that in addition to owning the economy, they now have the opportunity to "own" the government for a "very small percentage of their wealth." A $400 million dollar donation by a family worth $50,000 million is a small investment for them to preserve the status quo by which they so tremendously benefit, he explained. He closed by saying that the "future of American democracy is at stake," and that is why he supports a constitutional amendment.

And that is where we are at. We are working toward a constitutional amendment. We are working to restore democracy. We are working to give the voice back to the people.

Democracy is for People.

The Republicans Won't Budget (Introduction)

A Blog Series in Response to the Republican Budget Proposal
 

Paul Ryan Presents the Path

The Path to Prosperity is the latest Republican proposal for continuing the tax and economic policies that have led us to this recession that has been thirty years in the making.  It is the work of Paul Ryan, the Republican Congressman from Wisconsin who heads the House's Committee on the Budget. There is a lot of information on this site I plan on refuting in the coming weeks. Although the arguments present themselves well, using an artfully orchestrated mix of logic and emotional appeals, theirs is a plan that has already been implemented over the course of three decades and its results are well known: an historically unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power have amassed in the top percentile of this country's elite.  

Furthermore, this accumulation of wealth has been justified based of a mythical belief in upward mobility, the American Dream, and that hard work yields the good life. Arthur Miller tried to wake us from that dream in 1949 with his screen play Death of a Salesman. I am doubtful that the American people chose to listen. 

This is what really happens in the America of reality, not the dream we try to blind ourselves by. Although it is true that there are many opportunities in this country, most will never becomes the Bill Gates and Mike Zuckerbergs we are told we can be. In fact, most will stay in the same class in which they were born. 

And their is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that those lower classes are increasingly becoming marginalized as their wages stagnate and the cost of living inflates. This is why we need progressive tax policies that redistribute wealth, not ensure that it remains locked up in the hands of an unsharing few. This is NOT a punishment for the rich, by dear Republicans. This is not a punishment. It is a compassionate and justified reality given the finiteness of wealth and resources on this planted. Why should one man own so much? Do we really worship some idea of success so much as to sacrifice our own self-worth to deify or turn to gods other human beings just like ourselves?

[click image to enlarge]

Ever since the Reagan myth of tickle-down was concocted in the 80s, the wealth gap in this country has been growing and growing. The graph on the left taken from the Economist demonstrates how Reagan's tax policies and trickle down theory only benefited the wealthiest of Americans. This recent housing bubble and bank collapse demonstrated the inherent flaws in this economic theory: wealth does not trickle down. It shoots upwards. Upward mobility in this county is also stagnating. Wages are frozen, and we work longer hours for less benefits. Part-time workers do not even have any benefits or job security, and this exploitation of low skill labor is very popular amongst corporate chains.   

The most insidious claim behind all of this is that we are in a "recession" when in fact this is a repression. It is a repression against not only the lower class, but the middle and upper middle class as well. In fact, everyone earning less than $300,000 a year is being repressed, because that is where the "progressive" tax bracket stops. Everyone earning more than that, pays the same 32% percent tax rate no matter how much they are earning. And in many cases, they pay an even smaller percent because much of their wealth is tied into investments, giving them a cozy 15% tax rate.  

This was just an introduction. I will be following up with argument by argument rebuttals of the Path to Prosperity's proposals, thereby demonstrating that theirs is a path towards plutocracy or rule of the wealthy. This is not the America our Founding Fathers had in mind. Theirs would not be an America of opportunity for the many, but an America of obscene wealth for the few. Our government's job is to collectively protect us from the abuses of individuals and corporations. We all pay our taxes. We all deserve equal protection. Privatization of these essential services is therefore not the solution. The government is not the enemy here.

Road Demons and CNN: News or Opinion?

The practice of editorializing news through speech and tone is a disservice to citizens who rely on what they watch to give them accurate perceptions about current events. The integrity of new stations has been increasingly suffering with increased sensationalizing and editorializing. Below is a small example from CNN in which the female reporter who says the motorcyclist is "lucky that he didn't land six feet underground after this stupid stunt...honestly."

I have a few responses to this. Number one, her manner of speech itself sounds "stupid" or uneducated. Second, luck is an objective reality in which many people do not believe and such objectivity and faith-based claims have no place in presenting a news story. Third, the entire comment is an outright opinion based and anger-filled claim.

Obviously this is just a very small news story, but it is a good example of how the news is degenerating. If we are not careful, we will soon be nothing but a bunch of hairy animals yelling at each other and shaking fists.

The National Review: Ambiguously Racist?

Why do some conservatives come off sounding ambiguously racist even when they try not to? 

An article in the conservative National Review got edgy this June. Their columnist, Robert Verbruggen, made an incendiary claim in his article, Black Studies 101. He admits that he "made an effort to see what black studies has to offer" and concluded that "There isn't much useful work coming out of black-studies departments."  What's worse, he says that black studies are "fixated on proving that everything is racist and everyone is racist."

Verbruggen is not so bold as to suggest eliminating black studies all together. Rather, his suggestion is that instead of having more professors "crying racism" they need professors to "make a more thorough effort to study black life." Do we really need to remind people like Mr. Verbruggen that suffering the prejudices of racism is one the biggest aspects of black life?

This insensitive article struck me as appalling especially considering conservatives are going to be fighting hard for states like North Carolina that have large black populations if they hope to win in 2012. To answer the question in italics above: I don't know, but the simple answer is probably right. Maybe some conservatives are just not good at hiding things.

Coliseum

Observing the past in the present.

McAfee Stadium, Oakland, California

A friend invited me to go to a baseball game today. I have never been inclined to go to one before, but thought I should take the time to spend with my buddy while experiencing the thrill for the first time in an attempt to understand why sports are so captivating. What ended up being so amazing about the whole event was the massively concentrated competitive energy I felt for the first time. While walking through the gates, I immediately heard the crowd cheering, the wind carrying their projected shouts like a tune originating from the brass of some loud trumpet. I immediately knew I was participating in something that people have been doing for ages.

When I came around the concrete corridor, I saw a field so magnificently green and large that it looked like it encompassed an unreal expanse. It suppressed me that the sight of all this should be so amazing. I had sees images of ballgames on television and in the papers all my life, but they did not provide me with the perspective depth that going to one of these mega sports arenas does. I could not understand their size--I could not feel it--until I let myself be overwhelmed by walking in the bleachers.

All of a sudden, there was silence as the National Anthem began to play. I could see patriotic minded men with their caps crossed over their hearts as they stared down onto the players and flag they so venerated. I did not feel the amount of pride they had in themselves and the game, however, and just stood there. Perhaps the shock-and-awe just seemed all too… mundane. But I started to understand the force of this unifying identity sports in America provides. Perhaps the rush is why many people are addicted.

Roman Coliseum, Italy

Watching the game and hearing the cheering made me think about our past. Was I feeling the same energy citizens of powerful nations like Rome felt? Had we all piled into this modern stadium to watch heroes compete against each other just like Roman citizens used to watch villains and gladiators fight in the arena to provide their spectators with fantasies of glory while quenching a blood-lust and competitive drive so many still seem to have?

Suddenly, I was very uncomfortable around these rowdy citizens. People seemed like they were libel to burst at the seams where strains of civility kept them from barbarian tendencies. I even witnessed an arrest made of a man who could not control himself. His friends created a mob, following him and the security guard to the little police station located inside. They were cursing and demanding that their friend be let loose. One of them even had the idea of “kicking [the] guy’s ass” who arrested his buddy.

Surpassing the games, I wandered through the windy corridors wondering if anything had changed in 2000 years of human evolution. I was glad when I left the shouting and cheering crowds behind, wishing that such scenes had remained a part of our past—wishing that they, like the present walls of Rome’s Coliseum, would have long since crumbled by now.

A Soldier's Soldier

How I became disillusioned by my experience in Iraq and how it made me a more loving person.  

I was running in formation with my fellow soldiers in basic training, singing wonderful martial cadences. We were running in the early morning sun, singing about killing the enemy—kicking ass and taking names. We were singing about the glories of war: jumping out of airplanes, taking on enemy fire, and dying for a great cause. We were singing about battle and how, if it ever came to it, we would proudly sacrifice our lives. What none of us knew at the time was that one day we would survive the battles we were to face, but that the cadences we all so loved would die along with the images of ourselves that we had built inside our heads.

I am writing this from personal experience as a soldier in the United States Army who served for 4 and a half years, 14 months of which took place in Baghdad, Iraq. In the army, I noticed I had created an idea of myself, which was impressed on me from the training I received and the society of soldiers with whom I lived. Now, I would like to share with you what I have learned in order to undo the destructive myths associated with heroism and honor.

From my very first day in the US Army, I entered into a society of soldiers. We were told that we had become men and were expected to behave like them. Our sergeants gave us a creed which we memorized along with “7 Army Values”. The creed was meant to set us apart from civilians and the enemy. The creed was to serve as a cornerstone for our new identities as soldiers. It told us that we were to “live the Army Values, place the mission first, and never accept defeat.”

At the time, I was proud of the idea of adhering to these ideals. We stood proudly as a team. And we stood apart, as exceptional individuals who did things better and more thoroughly than civilians. We were also more active—more “hard-core than them”. We woke up earlier, exercised together, trained in the mud for weeks without showers, worked longer, knew government secrets, and protected those who could not otherwise defend themselves.

Furthermore, we were better than the enemy. For us, there was no mission or task too great—there was no excuse for failure. Whatever the case, we were American soldiers, who, for the sake of the mission, could go anywhere and do anything. Whatever difficulties we may have been having, we just had to “suck it up and drive on.”

Our equipment was the best, and we were taught to have confidence in it. At the museums around the base, there were American army vehicles sitting next to enemy vehicles. Ours were big and mighty in comparison to the puny tin cans with which enemy would be fighting us.

The successes we had in Desert Storm proved how great we were. My unit in Germany had destroyed more tanks than any other in the history of armed conflict within a mere few days of fighting. What did I have to fear? What could strike me down?

Even if I were shot, my buddies would take care of me. We practiced combat first aid all the time, and were questioned about it daily: “What do you do with a sucking chest wound?” Put a piece of plastic on it to save the soldier’s life. “What do you do for a gut wound?” Cover the intestines and the medics will put the soldier back together when they get to him. Whatever the case may have been, there was a way of saving the soldier—there was always a way to cheat death.

That is how it was in training.

In May 2003, we received orders to deploy to Baghdad, Iraq to fight the ongoing war. In the months to follow, the only thing that seemed to hold true about my training was that we did things together. But were we doing them as a team? After some of the things I saw, I started to feel a little detached… from the team. And I wasn’t alone. I think we all slowly started to detach.

But, when we first got there, our values—our identities were still strong. We had gone to Iraq with brand-new equipment—we were trained and ready to kill. Eager to kill. There was an enemy out there that must be destroyed so that democracy could take hold in Iraq.

We were liberators. I was a liberator.

They loved us. When I looked out of the turret of my Humvee wearing the American flag on my right shoulder, people—women, children, men, and the elderly—all waved. Children would ask for candy, and men always wanted to know where we were from. “Fuck Saddam,” they all said to me with big smiles on their faces. I would later learn that this was one of the only things we actually agreed upon.

As the weeks went on, the cheer seemed to fade, and when we drove through Baghdad, it was no longer like being in a parade. Now, there was a sense—a strong sense of hostility. Attacks started, and mortars were shot into our compound daily. Because everyone seemed pissed at us, we started to assume that they were all responsible in one way or another for the attempts that had been made against our lives. My unit suffered its first casualty when one of our medics was blown in half with a grenade. The stories of death I had heard became a reality.

One of us had died. The men who were with him said he had lived for hours after they brought him to the hospital, but he eventually expired, surrounded by his friends. As I listened to the story of his death, it was hard to imagine that he had actually died. It was hard for me to believe in death…until I started seeing bodies for myself.

After having witnessed the deaths of 47 men, women, and children in a suicide bombing that happen in our sector of Baghdad. I could no longer say, “I am a liberator.” I could no longer say, “I am a guardian of liberty and freedom.” After all the dead… after seeing all the motionless… the pale… the drained… I came back to America. After seeing how men behave in war, after seeing… I could no longer maintain the identity of myself I once had.

I felt like I had been an oppressor. I had spent 14 months in a country that did not want me, and I had tried to push my values upon them. Now, when I watch movies of war, they embarrass me with their lies of heroics and honor. Men do not stand bravely to face the enemy when they have fresh images of death in their minds. Men do not sacrifice shit for the mission, but care only about saving their own asses.

No propaganda; no story; no myth held true.

All the honor, all the pride, all the duty, all the self-sacrifice went down the drain as quickly as the US army could wash the blood off the stained streets of Baghdad. US soldiers blown to pieces look just like Iraqi men blown to pieces. And pretty soon I started wondering, why the hell we had been out there blowing each other to pieces in the first place.

Was it because we were better? Was I better? Was I following my orders… fulfilling my mission? Was it because of 9/11? Or was it just because some men got a little carried away with themselves… forgetting all the things they share with one another… first and foremost being their right to life.

$1.4 Billion in Campaign Contributions

What Do $1.4 Billion Tell Us About Our Political Priorities and Unity?

Presidential and Congressional campaign contributions so far this year equal $1.4 Billion. That is enough money to make 1,400 people millionaires. It is absurd that we need to spend this much electioneering to put people in office.  

We need to re-prioritize as a country and come together as we used to. Instead of throwing money at candidates to represent personal financial interests out of fear of tax increases or over-regulation, we would be better off using that money to fund the government even with the imperfections and inefficiencies it has. A government that is funded and actually able to cover its expenses and help promote the general welfare as it is supposed to, would be a more desirable situation for all Americans rather than recoiling into our own fear-based self-interest. Democrats and Republicans alike are guilty of this and spend similar amounts on their campaigns.

Where’s My Stuff

How our wage stagnation might be an opportunity not a cost.

Looking at the state of our economy is upsetting, especially for the majority of us whole fall into the middle and lower tax brackets. We have been hearing about wage stagnation that can not keep up with inflating prices. This is perhaps the biggest hit the lower income earners have been taking. At a time when corporate profits are at record highs, it is easy to point out the injustice in this situation. It is easy to be mad, frustrated, and blighted. Companies take advantage of the worker surplus today in the 21st century just as factory owners and coercive foremen took advantage of children, women, and old men who were all but physically forced into coal mines and production lines 200 years ago. Have we really not progressed? The situation may seem bleak given these comparisons, but as an environmentalist, I have a second way of looking at this situation. 

Obviously we need to continue or restart the work that regulatory agencies are entrusted to do to limit corporate abuses and financial hoodwinking. We shall not loose sight of the fact that gross inequities created through corporate machinations must not go uncorrected. However, it is also important to embrace a new paradigm—one that is not so obscenely marked with excesses. For it is true, even in America, what we consider the poverty line constitutes what is in other parts of the world a standard of living comparable to the wealthy and privileged. Not being able to buy as much as our parent’s generation might not be such a bad thing.

This, of course, is not taking into consideration the rising cost of Medicare or our ethically malfeasant health insurance industry, driven by profiteering from our sickness and death. This too, as with corporate abuses, must be corrected and regulated.

But in the face of a warming planet, ever increasing pollution to our waterways and bodies, and air that is becoming toxified with mercury poisoning—the same stuff that drove hat makers into a frenzy of neurological madness in the 19th century—would it be a bad thing if we scaled back the output from these factories a little in light of the middle class’s growing inability to fuel their over-consumptive lifestyles? Probably not.

This paradigm change I refer to does not mean we have to get thrown back into the past where we live like paupers with no running water or sewage treatment. It refers simply to a life more focused on conservation, the relationships we have with each other instead of the horribly poor role models of typical television personalities, and a life more focused on inner richness, not annually renewed coats of exterior paint.

Granted, this is not to excuse economic injustice, corporatism, or the denial of fundamental human rights to health and happiness. But it is a way of viewing the scaling back of our purchasing power as an opportunity to invest in ourselves not in our things. Do we really need so much stuff?

Reintegration

Back in April 2003, my friend and I were ahead of the curve. Sitting in our Humvee on guard duty in downtown Baghdad in the 100 degree sun, I turned to Spc Peters and asked him: “What are you gonna say when people ask you what it was like out here?” He just sat there silently without responding. But I could tell he was thinking about it. His eyes squinted slightly and he just kind of started through time and space. After a minute he light another cigarette and we changed the subject.

Still, the question remained, and I knew when I got back I’d be asked a million times: “What was it like in Baghdad?” How could I answer that question a million times without being worn out, annoyed, and completely at a loss at how to describe a life changing 14 month deployment in hell without sounding either nuts, blasé, unaffected, or disinterested? How was I going to reintegrate and tell my story?

As it goes, months passed in Baghdad without any time seeming to have gone by. It wasn’t until a few weeks before we were scheduled to come back to the states that the Chaplin gathered us together in small groups to talk about reintegration. He asked what we would share with our wives, children, friends, and family. Most soldiers were adamant: “It ain’t their business to know,” one of them said. Their plan was just to lock it all away.

That’s not what I did, though. But I was lucky. I was lucky because I got out; left the Army as soon as we got back from Baghdad. I didn’t have to stick around in the Army, see the same battle torn faces every day, being constantly reminded of what we had seen and done. I got out. Took a vacation through Europe, met a bunch of wonderful people on my travels, and took a year off living and gardening with my grandmother. She was an East Prussian refugee who fled from the Russians in WWII. All her friends were raped and killed who stayed behind. Like me, she had been lucky too. And she understood.

It wasn’t enough, though. I was disillusioned by the war, hated the President and his administration, and just wanted to get out of America. So I went to Rome to study international relations to understand what went wrong.

Rome was good for me, but despite how happy I was living in that beautiful city, certain things still got under my skin. Like the superficiality. Sitting in the garden one day, this girl who studied at our school wouldn’t stop talking about all the clothes and makeup she had, and how she was so distraught over not having enough money to afford her favorite Prada handbag she presumably had come to this city just to buy. “Don’t you have enough already,” I finally snapped at her, leaning over my friend’s lap to get close and in her face. “There’s people in Baghdad who live in piss and shit. People who go to the market every day not knowing whether or not they’re gonna come home to see their family killed in some suicide bombing. And you only care about a piece of cow ass with the word Prada branded on its side.”

I admit, I kinda lost it for a bit, but although I didn’t regret speaking my mind, I also knew at the same time that I’d have to learn how to chill out. I’d have to learn how to reintegrate.

I think, in the end, what really made that possible was my recognition of that fact. And growing up. And always being open to criticism. And trying not to think that you’re always right. Thinking about the war can still piss me off, but the anger is directed at those who designed it, not the civilians who’ll never have any chance at understanding what we went through. That just brushes off of me now. If anything, instead of getting angry, sometimes I just get really sad. Although they’ve healed, the scars from Baghdad can still be felt. And sometimes, soldiers just need someone to understand what the original wound felt like.

Hope or Dust

...Sometimes we have to let things be.

I remember driving down the highway to the airport in Baghdad. It was the deadliest road in the whole country, I think. Every day we’d hear stories about a truck getting blown up or contractors being ambushed and killed. The stories didn’t help our fragile sense of security and driving past the carcasses of blown up vehicles only made it worse.

We were constantly driving down that road. That was 2003. It’s been so long I hardly remember what we were doing driving all over the place. The First Sergeant made up some excuse for our driving around aimlessly. One day he said we had to find the cheapest soccer balls in the whole city to give the kids in our district as part of our public relations outreach. If that was the case, I said, we shouldn’t be looking for the cheapest balls. He looked confused.

Like most days in Baghdad, this one seemed fairly normal. That’s what I always hoped for. Things hardly ever turned out that way, though. There was always some house to raid, some suspicious car to investigate, or some water tank being pulled by a donkey that most assuredly had rocket launchers inside of it, but didn’t.

After months of nothing ever happening when we were looking for it, I realized the whole goose chase after the our self-made "enemy" was a joke and stopped caring. They would find us or something unexpected would happen at the most unlikely moment.

And it did: one sergeant got hit by a mortar going to the bathroom. We lost a medic when he went to respond to an attack. Eating breakfast and joking one morning over French toast, I heard a loud boom which turned out to be a suicide bomber who took the lives of 43 women and children with him. We crashed the HUMVEE, hit land mines, got caught in riots, and had our lunches interrupted by dead bodies floating by us in the Euphrates River. Just when we though we could finally relax, something crazy would always happen, and all the other times, all the other times when things were still and silent and safe, I was on edge passing by each road marker and sign with a sense of doom and fear.

This day was like that. Nothing had happened for weeks and I was finally starting to reassure myself that I might be okay. That I might actually make it out of Baghdad alive. Thus it was inevitable that something would happen.

Turning around the wide corner of one segment of the highway, we saw a huge plume of black smoke. It was billowing up to the sky in some kind of satanic frenzy. I’d never seen so much smoke before--thick and black like a filthy cotton ball. Then we saw what it was coming from and my sergeant told me to slow down. We stopped about 100 yards behind this truck that was on fire. Yellow and red balls of flames undulated and contracted, burning off paint, oil, diesel, and rubber. We got out of the HUMVEE and walked over to a group of 4 soldiers who must have arrived earlier. They were just standing there. Smoking. Staring. "What the hell happened," we asked. "Musta been hit with a bomb," they said. "Well, who was it," we asked. "We don’t know, man," they said, "Musta been some contractor." "Well, did you try to help," I asked. Their sergeant looked at me with a gaze of pragmatism I hadn’t yet developed. "You got over there and try to help," he said with a smile. "Be my guest."

I don’t know what I was thinking. Can you imagine trying to enter the center of the sun? Somehow I thought it could be done if your intentions were good enough. A man sat in the driver’s seat of that truck dying. Being burnt alive. That’s how I saw it. He was sitting there waiting for someone to help him. That’s how I envisioned it.

You can’t fault me for being hopeful, I guess. So I walked out to that truck determined to help, but couldn’t get anywhere near it. Once I got within a basketball court's distance, it felt like someone had whacked me in the face with a hot iron skillet. The flames were loud and roaring, an updraft of wind kicked sand in my eyes, and I could barely see into the driver’s cab because of the inferno blocking my view.

I instantly realized a whole lot about life. No one was in that cab alive and waiting to be saved. No one could live in that for more than a second. I turned around and walked back to the HUMVEE. The sergeant didn’t say a word. Not a smart comment. Not a joke. Not a funny glance. He just let me go and sit.

No matter how much I wanted to help, there’s times when there’s nothing we can do. Sometimes we just have to watch these unpleasant things go down while they choke us with anger and feelings of injustice. That's how I started feeling about the whole war and our involvement in it.

But despite all the violence and hopelessness, that incident and all the others I witnessed never stopped me from wanting to help and trying to help and hoping for help. If we give up on that, we might as well join the driver in the passenger seat.

Surfer Girl Project Wahine Goes International

Able to show off her own battle wounds from surfing, Dionne Ybarra now helps bring the sport to girls caught in real struggles and war overseas.

The Wahine Project wants to break down the barriers that prevent girls from enjoying surfing. Geographical and financial ones are those faced by girls in the U.S., but when the project’s founder, Dionne Ybarra learned about the challenges faced by the girls in Gaza, her work started to incorporate an international focus. “Girls involved in sports in those societies don’t know if they’ll be able to continue surfing after a certain age because it’s deemed inappropriate,” Dionne explains. “I was shocked to learn this because I started skate boarding at the age these girls are right now, and I couldn’t imagine someone telling me I’d have to stop.”

Even though she’s up against centuries old traditions and beliefs, she’s still adamant. “To participate in a sport is a human right,” Dionne says passionately about the girls surfing in Gaza. To encourage the girls to go against the current, the Wahine Project has started a pen-pal exchange with the Gaza girls and sent them clothes. “These girls can be ostracized by society just for participating in the sport they love,” Dionne says.

If it’s an issue of clothing--something especially sensitive in Muslim cultures--Dionne says there are solutions. She’s seen women in modified wetsuit-Burk-as that cover their bodies.

Besides just being covered, the girls are also required to have a male entourage with them. “Some are lucky,” Dionne tells, “and they have fathers or brothers who are lifeguards.” Those girls can essentially go to the beaches and catch waves whenever their family is on duty. Many others are not so fortunate, however.

And there’s also the environmental and political issues. Besides the beaches being some of the most polluted in the world, many parts are excluded by patrolling Israeli warships--not the idyllic backdrop for a surfer girl party.

For Dionne, these issues are all very important, but she wants to keep her focus on just helping girls enjoy the sport they love. “The problem of women’s rights is something I’m really passionate about, but I’m afraid it could take over and distract me. It is just one aspect of the work I do.”

The crux of the Wahine Project’s focus is getting girls to build their self-confidence through surfing. If they are empowered enough by that self-confidence to continue a broader battle in the fight for women’s rights, although not her primary objective, Dionne still feels that’s a great outcome.

Understanding Patriotism

What is truly patriotic has nothing to do with flags and songs but what we do for others.

Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds

A patriot, as defined by the dictionary, is someone who defends popular liberty and zealously safeguards his or her country’s welfare. Certain things come to mind: defending your nation, paying your taxes and making sacrifices for your fellow countrymen. What is striking a nerve today is the misuse of patriotism and the way people seem to define it.

Maybe Samuel Johnson said it best while writing The Patriot in 1774, two years before our Revolution: “…for a man may have the external appearance of a Patriot without the constituent qualities; as false coins have often luster, tho’ they want weight.”

Now in 2011, as a veteran of the Iraq War, I am dismayed to see a proliferation of empty symbolic gestures by our politicians being mistaken for acts of patriotism. Sticking a flag in your front lawn, wearing a stars and stripes bikini, toting a chainsaw, capping a moose with your rifle, or igniting fireworks is not in and of itself “patriotic.” However, going against their better judgment, people have started accepting these emotional appeals as patriotic, when in fact these actions do nothing to defend liberty or our country’s welfare.

Corporate Profits

Feigned patriotic gestures such as these are used to cover true acts of selfishness and greed. What has been going on in Washington is not patriotic at all. An oligarchic distribution of wealth has been achieved in the wake of the largest wealth gap this nation has ever seen, while the financiers and money makers grin all the way to the bank. People talk about a “recession” at a time when corporate profits are at record levels. If the rich create jobs, where have they gone with unemployment over 9 percent?

The patriotic values of our Founding Fathers in no way hinted at creating a country that maintains such a disproportionate distribution of wealth as we have, or a country where the only decent education left for children is in the hands of the private sector, or one where people will die because they don’t have money to pay for an insurance plan.

What is patriotic is a willingness to give back to the country that has made success and wealth possible for those who live as modern-day Pharaohs instead of fearfully hoarding it all for themselves. What is patriotic is to stop feeding Americans myths about how the rich are taxed too much already in a time when the accumulation of their wealth seems unending. What is patriotic is to stop using “socialism” as a four-letter word to kill programs designed to help people back on their feet who don’t even have bootstraps of their own to pull themselves up by.

Common Americans have sacrificed so much already, and they keep giving. They give a bigger proportion of their paycheck in taxes than the rich with their loopholes and capital gains. The average American fills the ranks of the military and works just as many hours for a significantly less substantial standard of living. They have done all they can, but are still blamed for sucking the system dry. This inequity tirade has been heard and tried before.

What we are now calling for a silencing of distracting and insincere “patriotic” squawking. Are we electing politicians for their personalities or their competence? It is time to move beyond a middle school styled popularity contest for picking our national and global leaders. The President is not a celebrity. This nation is not a reality show. If we are going to fix this country’s problems we need to start taking the political process more seriously. A true patriot has no need to flash credentials. Just look at what they have done for others. Look at what they have really done for their country.

Veterans Transition Center

 If Project HIRED can’t get them in time to help, the VTC picks up the gauntlet. Only problem is, hardly anybody has heard about it.

Project HIRED is out to help veterans who have a bad rap or no voice amongst businesses. Many veterans who come back from life-threatening experiences in war suffer from what is called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), and it interferes with every aspect of their lives to include finding a stable job and housing. PTSD is nothing new. In WWI they called it “shell shock” and in WWII it was named combat fatigue. PTSD separates former warriors from the rest of society and the people who suffer from it seem distant, prone to anger, and unable to communicate their emotions or talk about their past.

Project HIRED was in Monterey this summer with its Wounded Warrior Workforce to host a career fair for vets. It was an all day event that set out with the goal of bridging the gap between veterans and business. Air Force Major General Mary Kight said, “I spoke with many business leaders this morning who want to help these vets in their transition. This is about putting your money where your mouth is.” Barbara Williams from Oracle said, “Hiring vets is like making a long-term investment."

Barbara should know. She heads Oracle's Injured Veteran Job and Training Program which has selected 13 veteran interns and placed 4 in permanent jobs since its conception in 2008 which was a spur-of-the-moment effort at good PR. Here is his how it happened: during a press conference a few years bakc, someone asked Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison, “What does Oracle do for vets?” Without hesitation, Elision responded, “We have a veteran’s program, of course.” But they did not. So he then rushed to the drawing boards and had one created.

Is this what we need to do to get industry on board? One audience member asked Williams, "Do we just need to start calling out bussinesses to get them to help vets?" According to her, this is not the answer.

The right answer is pure economics according to Williams. “Business is still business,” she maintains. “It’s not about getting hired because someone feels sorry for you.” Economically it is a good investment in human capital. Veteran work values and ethics come from a training regime that instills selfless service, a feeling of duty, responsibility, personal accountability, teamwork, and humility. These are just not found anywhere else in the civilian work sector. Because of PTSD, however, companies have to invest in educating its employees on veteran issues, like why they may be quiet and recalcitrant and what to say or not joke about in their presence. “Some of them in the business world are slow to get it,” she said about other companies, “but they will get it in the end.”

One problem vets have when they go looking for jobs is that they do not say enough about themselves. Veterans are trained warriors and that mentality does not leave a person. One of the things they are trained to be is humble and obedient. “They do their job because its their job,” explains General Kight. They are not used to talking about it or talking themselves up. To help with this, a resume writing workshop was offered to help vets beef up their experiences into translatable language. But when they go in for that pivotal interview, the vets are on their own. So the General encourages vets to get over their service oriented shyness: “Tell them about your service, your skills, your work ethic, yourself, where you want to go, and what you want to give the company.” Military service men and woman took and oath to defend this country, she goes on to explain. If citizens can trust them with their self-defense, they can trust them to work in their companies. “A warrior can bring many capabilities to an organization. You want those capabilities.”

A vet’s humility and shyness are not their only obstacles to getting a job, however. Gwen Ford tells how many a time a vet will get a job in a position he or she did not thoroughly research, end up disliking it, and leaving after a few months. This costs businesses tons of money for training. After such experiences, many managers are left with a bad taste in their mouths about vets. “They get burned and say ‘I’m not hiring another vet because they cut and run,’” Ford said.

PTSD is the biggest barrier. It makes social interaction difficult and in the worst cases leads to high and inhibiting anxiety. If they can not overcome it, their prospects of reintegrating to the work force are very bleak. To help, Project HIRED has a service dog program. These service or therapy dogs are a “tool to help veterans” said the program’s head Mary Cortani. “They’re just a tool, but it’s the best tool there is.” Based out of Gilroy, Cortani, a veteran herself, and one of her successful veterans and his pup came to the career fair to share their stories. Although still experiencing some social anxiety, Jeremy was able to combat his anger with the calming help of Rocky.

But there are many who do not find help in time. This is where we go to the darker side of veteran employment: unemployment and homelessness.

~~~ 

Lydia is a Monterey resident who's lived around many of our homeless and been on the brink of loosing her own roof a few times herself. She reads Machiavelli and says the system is just trying to keep them down. "There are many programs out to help them, but people in need just aren't aware." Lydia pointed me in the direction of the Veterans Transition Center (VTC). It was there that I met Andrew Jacobs and John McCarthy.

The VTC is located by the old Fort Ord base close to the new shopping center off Imjin Parkway in Marina. The houses where veterans are temporarily placed for two years sit quietly. No children play in the yards and no dogs bark at passers-by, and there are no passers-by to bark at. The homes don't look abandoned. They just look like everybody suddenly left or never woke up to start the day.

Then I saw John McCarthy--a burly man carrying a huge sack of plastic bottles out to his friend's white truck. They were going to make some money by recycling. John considers himself a new arrival. He just got to the VTC in February and has until 2013 to find permanent housing. His story confirms what Lydia said about awareness.

He joined the US Navy as a damage-control man/firefighter in 1993 and left after six years. He received an honorable discharge, but as soon as he got out, "things got spotty," he says. "I had a methamphetamine addiction before I went in the military, but once in, I got into my alcoholic tendencies. When I got out, I came home to Sacramento and stayed with my parents till I got put in jail for six months."

After serving his time, he found a job with the railroad he couldn't maintain. "I put myself through a lot of dark shit, but my cellmate had told me about the Veteran's Association (VA) in Palo Alto. I'd always heard bad things about the VA from my uncles who were all frontliner vets, but my cellmate said they've become really helpful."

Even with this glimmer of hope, it took a lot of strength for John to seek the help he knew he needed. "I was running with the best biker gangs. Everyone went to prison, though. It was all bad; all kinds of bad shit. I ended up sleeping in a creek bed in Menlo Park by the VA until I admitted myself to the psych ward."

John stayed there for 45 days under the care of professionals while he applied for the program at the VTC down here. He had never heard about it before. When asked what the VTC did to help, John says, "I lost my mind. I lost everything, and the VTC accepted me wholeheartedly. I have a lot of job prospects now and am really happy."

We talked to Kurt Brux, one of the Substance Abuse Counselors at the VTC, to get a better idea for what they do to help the 40 to 50 veterans housed on average during their 18 to 24 month program. "The idea is to place these veterans in permanent housing by either getting them back into the workforce or getting them the entitlements they've earned." That's the easy part, because as Project HIRED has shown, there's a lot of employers who want vets. "The hard part," Kurt says, "is getting them to break their bad habits. There's no drugs or alcohol allowed here and the vets have to see their therapists and take their medications if that's what their doctors order."

In the past, most of the vets who came to the VTC were suffering from organ failures that prohibited them from maintaining stable jobs. "Now people just can't find work," Kurt says. "What we're seeing are older vets, not so much younger ones."

In addition, he says the success rate is pretty good at the VTC. Around 80% of the vets who come find housing and never need help again. Kurt's bit of eternal wisdom: "Just changing one degree of a person's bad behavior can change the trajectory of their life."

Andrew Jacobs is proof of that.

He joined the Army in the '80s as an 11-Bravo. That's an infantryman otherwise known as the typical rifle totting combat warrior depicted in movies. Andrew shows us what war is really about, though, and it isn't glorious. Like many soldiers, he hated all the killing and the death. "I saw shit I wasn't prepared for," he says. He stopped wanting to go on patrols and his sergeant called him out on it, painting him to be a coward. PTSD wasn't understood.

Then he suffered a traumatic brain injury while in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. "The army didn't do anything to help," he says. They just let him loose after he got out in 1991. He was okay, though, until he had a stroke. "Initially, I was quadriplegic, then I got my arms back in a few short months, but I've never been able to walk again."

Andrew now gets around in the red scooter I met him riding along Imjin Parkway. He told me his story over the noise of passing cars and trucks. "I went to work for Home Depot before my stroke, but then I couldn't walk and started having all these seizures. I was homeless for half a year."

He eventually made his way to the VA in Palo Alto with his wife pushing him around in a wheelchair. The advisors there pointed him to the VTC. "The first thing they did at the VTC," he says, "was give me a medical checkup and help me start dealing with my problems. They got me all new identification cards and my entitlements."

Andrew graduated from the program on Thursday (7/21). He was able to find housing and get the entitlements he needs to support himself. After loosing everything and even being robbed of one scooter while handicapped, he's got his second chance. Hopefully for the other vets, there's plenty more to go around.

Clean Air Legislation NOT a Punishment

Clean air legislation is not a punishment, and Republicans need to stop using the old “we’ll be punishing the American people” line whenever they start shooting down laws designed to limit the effect human activity has on the climate. Newt Gingrich recently used this tactic when speaking about clean air legislation being debated in Congress. Nobody is “punishing” anyone for the CO2 that has been emitted in the atmosphere and these tricks to vilify legitimate attempts at mitigating environmentally harmful human activity is ethically irresponsible and destructive.

Adjusting to new environmental circumstances is goal of clean air legislation, not punishing American businesses or taxpayers. It is a form of regulation not a punitive measure or process. This regulation is naturally unfavorable because it will most likely translate into Americans changing their lifestyles—how much they consume and what types of cars they can buy for example. However, this does not mean that our quality of life will change, as has also been purported by many Republicans.

This fear based theme of a diminished quality of life is the basis upon which Republican resentment to things like clean air legislation is based. A change in lifestyle does not mean our quality of life will change. It is important for us to understand this difference and look to history for an applicable example.

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were designed to regulate the amounts of toxic emissions coming from power plants and cars. This was not a punitive measure but rather a preventive measure meant to enhance our quality of life—the exact opposite of what the Republicans argue. What positive change happened because that legislation? Toxic sulfur dioxide was taken out of the air, people could breath better without contracting repertory disease, and it saved the forests that were being eaten alive by acid rain. Was that punishing the American people?

Now the topic of debate is CO2, a non-toxic albeit climate disruptive emission or greenhouse gas that has been proven to raise global temperatures and the acid levels of the ocean—if this continues, by the way, it could lead to no more fish.

So legislation to reduce excessive emissions of CO2 are not punitive. They are preventive. They are designed to prevent future disasters like running out of fish to eat, the flooding of all coastal cities because of sea level rise, and widespread crop failures from desertification in the American mid-West. Furthermore, this legislation can prevent future conflicts over oil and cut off the supply of U.S. dollars going to foreign dictators. Is this a punishment?

The answer is no.

It is true, however, that some industries will have to adjust, but like with any innovation that ultimately leads to better the lives of everyone, they will be able to count their loses and recuperate them through investments in alternative sources of energy. There are also plenty of job re-training assistance programs out there that can be expanded in any clean air legislation seeking approval.

One this is for sure, clean air legislation being debated in Congress should never be labeled as a punishment because it is not. Punishments administered by courts not our representative in Congress. It is a cheep scare tactic Republicans use to rally the masses and it is time the American people take note: the Republicans have narrow interests to protect the coal and oil industries. It is time we demand that they fight for the rest of America as well.

How War Turned Me into an Environmentalist

It’s so cliché now to say that we wouldn’t be involved in a war with Iraq if we were not dependent upon Middle Eastern oil. It’s easy enough to make that conclusion intellectually. We can look at the costs and benefits of going to war, securing a country, and attempting to maintain peace for what is now going on to become a decade long engagement wrought with hostility, death, and destruction.

As a 23 year old soldier in the US Army, however, my experience was much more personal and fundamentally life altering than an intellectual realization. I became disillusioned from my experience in the war, and that is what I’d like to share with you.

Most boys growing up dream of being in the army. They play with G.I. Joes and throw water balloon grenades at each other, and all own at some point or another a cap gun—which inevitably drives mom crazy enough to the point of confiscating it.

For me, I began thinking of what life would be like in the army after my dad showed me how to shoot a rifle at the age of 13. I loved the power of its kick against my shoulder and enacted heroic scenes out in the woods behind the house. I wouldn’t pretend so much that I was shooting other people as I was fighting for a cause worth fighting. It wasn’t about the killing and violence so much as it was about the fulfillment of what we’ve been led to believe is life’s highest calling: the fight for liberty and freedom.

Coupled with my love for history, tradition, order, and honor, I was naturally drawn to the US Army, and I joined right after I graduated high school in 2000. I was proud to learn that the army was even older than America—it’d been founded a full year before the Declaration of Independence was signed. I felt like I was part of history’s finest example of freedom’s power—the true incarnation of liberty, the US Army. And we stood as defenders of that liberty. We represented sacrifice.

Cultivating pride in our willingness to sacrifice was central to the indoctrination that basic training played. I remember my drill sergeants telling us stuff like civilians are too weak to defend themselves and that soldiers never quit. We were even dazzled with stories of Honor Guard soldiers at Arlington Cemetery who maintained their ridged position of attention while four-inch long icicles formed under their nostrils during their hour-long shifts in the freezing cold.

Those stories were all very impressive, but they didn’t prepare us for what we faced in the Iraq desert. Nothing can prepare you for it. That’s why they call it “traumatic.”

The only thing we saw when we arrived in May 2003 was destruction. I remember everything was on fire. The whole city seemed to be burning. Looters were rampant, soldier had orders to destroy any propaganda structures of Saddam Hussein, and when no body was looking, people were breaking rules left and right. Iraqis peddled whiskey and porn to soldiers who’d been instructed not even to look them in the face or engage in conversation.

All this created a surreal atmosphere, but after the smoke and the dust cleared and my new reality slowly sunk in, it was time to “get to work.” We had a city and a country to rebuild. We, in the tradition of Roman conquerors, had the task of “establishing the conditions necessary for democracy to take hold.” “What are these conditions,” I asked my sergeant. He told me just to worry about our unit's security.

I got the feeling that nobody really knew what the heck we were actually supposed to be doing over there. We would drive around every day to show our presence. That is, the commanders just wanted the Iraqis to know that we were there and things had changed. They didn’t have to live in fear anymore and we were their liberators.

And boy, it sure felt that way. It was the craziest experience of my life. I mean, how many people get the opportunity to sit in the gunner’s seat of a Humvee and play the role of a conquering hero? It sure felt that way. It sure felt like we were justified in being there even if the stories of WMDs sounded a bit hokey, the Iraqis seemed tremendously happy to have us there. Women, children, young men and old all came out to great us. They’d put down whatever they were doing, wake up from their naps, and interrupt their conversations just to run out to the sewage flooded streets and cheer for us.

After six months, they seemed like family

One of the biggest things that struck us were the kids. They were always there, and they would praise us, thank us, beg us for candy, ask us for money, and offer us sodas. Six for a dollar, of course. Six sodas for just a buck!

When we first got there, the buck did go a long way. But after weeks, and months, and seasons of being there, the tone changed. After the euphoric stage of dwelling upon the greatness it felt to be a conquering hero, after all the friendly Iraqi faces stopped waving and started staring at us with scorn, after the children stopped begging for candy and started throwing rocks, and after we saw 45 men, women, and children blown up by a bomb, I didn’t feel like a hero anymore.

I felt terrible. I felt sick. We weren’t sheltered from the news. We knew the justification for being in Iraq was a hoax. We knew before we even went, but we said to ourselves no matter which way you slice it, at least we’re getting rid of Saddam and bringing these people liberty.

Really?

That’s not how the Iraqis saw it. They told us, Saddam was bad, but what we brought to their country—the death, the destruction, the hostility, the pain, and the loss—that was far worse. To them, freedom hadn’t manifested, and the situation was getting worse.

Security wasn’t so much an issue when we first got there. In fact, we routinely slept on guard duty. And the Iraqis who tried to attack our compound seemed like they were joking around. They always shot their mortars in the wrong direction, and never seemed to hit anything. In fact, some of them probably wouldn’t have been able to hit the southern hemisphere if they were standing on the equator.

Slowly, though, things got worse and worse and worse. People started dying. We lost a medic. They’re supposed to save us. I remember attending the ceremonies. It sent chills. Then we lost an Iraqi translator who’d been working for us. A female Iraqi translator. They followed her home from our compound and turned her car into a sieve of bullet holes with her sitting in it.

Then the insurgency started in April 2004 and we had a run with suicide bombers killing Iraqi civilians by the hundreds. One morning at breakfast, we heard a boom and drove out to where an attack had occurred in our sector of the city killing 45 men, women, and children. Not one of us standing around that mess felt like a hero. Not one of us felt like this wasn’t in some way our fault. Our fault for being there. Our fault for not delivering on our promises. How dared we stand proud in those Humvee turrets. I wanted to take back all my pride.

I felt humbled and sad. Everyday I saw an Iraqi child walking home from school or running up to our truck for candy, I felt sad knowing that he or she may be the next victim of some insurgent. It was hard to feel justified in anything—especially in my standard of living. What made us better than these people, I thought to myself? “They’re just filthy Iraqis,” some soldiers would still say. Others had changed their tone, and some were downright distraught. We’d go talk to the chaplain about how we could justify being in Iraq running around with machine guns and commanding people what to do.

There were no answers.

And even after I came back I still could not find any justification, explanation, cause, reason, or purpose for our presence in Iraq and our committed dependence to a resource that has proven to be the most environmentally and sociably destructive commodity injected into human society like a syringe of black goo.

Was this taking on too much personal responsibility? Who knows? But I decided to study international relations when I got out in an attempt to prevent future conflicts. I’m gonna skip to the punch line here, which may seem fairly obvious by now. Considering resources as the primary cause of conflicts, it wasn’t long before I became an environmentalist. We all know the problems with fossil: supporting foreign dictators, polluting the land, sea, and skies, damaging our health. Fracking. Tar Sands. The Gulf. At the risk of sounding like a liberal sounding board, this list goes on and on. If we could just get off of this junk, I said to myself, we’d be avoiding all that. If we could just conserve more. We'd be avoiding all that. If we were all environmentalists, conscious of our actions in the larger geopolitical sphere, we would be avoiding all that. 

After seeing the real human cost of life associated with a resource, I became dedicated to change. People need to be thinking about this stuff. If America were a small island state, it wouldn’t matter if we used a little bit of oil, but America isn’t innocent anymore. We’ve mettle in the affairs of other countries, and that takes on a whole ton of responsibility. Why does a 120 pound woman need a huge suburban vehicle to go two blocks to the corner store for milk when that gas might have cost some child his life?

It’s messed up, and the world isn’t fair.

I’ve been struggling with that realization ever since I got back and I still do. It was really bad when I first got back, though. I couldn’t have a “light conversation”. To me, everything was dramatic. My mom would even joke with me not seeing the connections in my statements. “Oh, you’re so dramatic,” she’d say. “It’s the German Sturm und Drang in you.”

Eventually, I learned to mellow out, and now I can even talk about the latest fashion trends without feeling compelled to launch into a discussion of superficiality and the unsustainable nature of current consumer culture.

But I have still not given up on the battle I started fighting when I came back from Iraq. I am committed to environmentalism and sustainability because I am committed to doing what is right for everyone. Not just America, not just our heroes, but also for the hundreds of millions who live and die in silent untold suffering.

Bye-Bye Baghdad

For a large portion of human life, war is a natural condition in which they are forced to live. Death becomes the norm, and blood covered streets incite no more awe than a red sky during the sunset hours. But for me, it’s not normal, and I’m going home.

For the past fourteen months, I’ve been stuck, trapped, suffocated, and breathing death. But now I’m finally on the road that will take me back to a world in which I can live. There is nothing out here between Baghdad and Kuwait—just the sand and all that crap I’m leaving behind. The Humvee's engine is roaring and overheating, but we keep pushing it because the convoy is long, and I don’t want to hold it up with our mechanical malfunctions. We’ll just keep pushing the machine like they pushed us for the past fourteen months. The only thing I can think about is getting back to our base in Germany and visiting my relatives. But right now there is the road in front of me, and it’s so long I can see it evaporating on the desert horizon.

When we get to Kuwait, who knows how much longer we will have to wait for a flight home. No dates are set. No dates have ever been set. We came over here last May 2003 with orders that said we had to stay “until the mission was accomplished.” It’s now August 2004, and I thought Bush said the mission was accomplished months ago.

Apparently, it wasn’t for us. We stayed. And when we thought we were going home, when the soldiers began counting down the days from ten to one, anxiously anticipating the moment they’d be back in the arms of their families, wives, and children, they were told their tours of duty had been extended until our mission was accomplished. At times, it was hard to understand what the mission was. Right now, however, we all understand it’s to get the hell out of here.

Looking out of the turret of the dusty Humvee all I can see is the convoy, desert, and sky. The tan military vehicles stretch for miles becoming little specks in the distance, and I wonder why we haven’t been attacked yet. Many others have been. Just looking at the sheer numbers we possessed one would think that our power was infinite, but we all knew better than that. Even if we tried to convince ourselves of our invincibility—that our superiority was just too overwhelming for the enemy—we still couldn’t beat back the fear that penetrating metal shards might rip through our bodies the next time a bomb goes off or an insurgent fires a rocket. The equipment might be infinite, but our lives were finite.

We have been on the road now for twelve hours. Comfort is a memory, something I left back at the base in Germany ages ago. Now I am used to the sand and sweat. The heat coming off the road feels like a turbine engine blowing hot exhaust on me. As I look over the coiled ammunition belts on the roof of the Humvee, I see an Iraqi walking with his camels and wonder how he does so with no shoes on his swollen feet when the sun is beating down the desert sand at a hundred and forty degrees. Letting my mind wonder helps distract me from this mundane reality and the anticipation of getting home.

This turret is one of the few things I’ve known for these past fourteen months. I’m hanging out of it now and was hanging out of it way back then when we first rolled into Baghdad. I rolled in with a company of strangers—gritty soldiers whose peculiarities I thought I’d never get used to. But after weeks and months, I learned to call the men I’d been with brother and asshole—both terms having the same qualities of endearment amongst soldiers.

Peters, Specialist Peters, was by a very large margin the best friend I made. We’d stay up late at night philosophizing about the situation we were in while an unseen enemy shot mortars into our compound. We tried to understand what part we were playing in this big game of politics and world domination. The conclusions we came to filled us with pride.Back in the beginning of our deployment, back before I knew the true effect of bombs, back before I knew the smell of death, back then I would stick my head out of the turret of my Humvee with a sense of pride while grabbing the handle of my machine gun like a man determined to change the world. Back then, I thought I was “fulfilling the mission” and doing something great and worthwhile. I thought I was welcome in this country like a savior bringing justice and peace. However, the only thing that seemed to follow me was destruction and death, and eventually I saw how wrong it all was.

One night, after working a checkpoint, a group of soldiers came back to the tents where we lived in our compound located in the north-west district of Baghdad. Looking up from the hose I used to brush my teeth, I could see they were excited about something. As they dismounted their vehicles, tossing all their heavy equipment on their cots, I went up to Private Hollander and asked what had happened.

“We got some guy at the checkpoint,” he told with the air of a trophy hunter.

“Yeah,” I asked, “What happened? Did he just not stop or something?”

“The fucking guy wouldn’t stop,” he continued talking while taking off his ballistic vest, “James was on the machinegun, and we fired warning shots and everything, but the guy wouldn’t stop. So James starts shooting at the guy, and the car accelerates, hitting the barricades and everything. ’Cause we didn’t know what to do, we all started shooting. Dude, afterwards we counted like two hundred thirty three bullet holes in the car. It was so fucked up, we had to call in a truck to haul it out.”

“And what happed to the guy,” I asked.

“Oh fuck, I got pictures,” he said, pulling out a digital camera from the cargo pocket of his uniform, “here check ’em out.”

I checked them out, and felt bad for the guy they shot. He was just some drunken Iraqi who got confused and didn’t know what to do when a bunch of soldiers started yelling and shooting at him as he drove into a flood of bright spotlights and a rain of gunfire. I felt bad for him because I knew how much those men had been waiting to kill someone, wanting to put their training and equipment to the test. They looked for the opportunity around every corner, built up with frustration and anger they couldn’t relieve by any other means. Did they have to kill the man who would not stop at the checkpoint? Yes. Did they have to proudly take pictures of him? No. But it was the only way they could dehumanize the guy to shelter their minds from what they were forced to do. Had they fulfilled the mission? Who the hell knows.

I’m trying not to think about all those stories anymore as I look at the last Iraqi road I hope ever to see. I’ve vowed never to return. When I first heard I was getting deployed, it was hard to believe. I thought we’d be over here for just a few months. That’s what they told us anyway. When we got here in May 2003 and they said we’d be home for Christmas. The first wave of soldiers had already destroyed Saddam’s army by the time our unit arrived. Now according to orders all we had to do was “provide the conditions for peace so democracy could establish itself.” The Iraqis would go for the whole plan according to the storyline. They hated Saddam and loved the U.S. That even seemed to be true in the beginning.

I wasn’t worried about getting killed back then. I just didn’t want to waste my life in the desert. In fact, getting killed wasn’t something many of us thought about. Thinking about it just made things worse. But when the insurgency flared up in April, 2004, progressively increasing the death toll on a daily basis, we couldn’t escape the thought that we could be next at any moment. I’d run statistics through my head everyday to calm and console myself that the chances of getting killed were practically none or as slim as possible considering the circumstances. We’d been there for months, I’d tell myself, and only lost one guy. I had good chances I figured. We all did. Except for those eight men.

We were sitting by the radios one day, supplying backup for a patrol that was sweeping through the countryside looking for mines and roadside bombs. We were supposed to be there as a quick reaction force should anything go wrong. Something did go wrong. Something we all heard and felt.

I’d heard large blasts before. Everybody knows how those fireworks shake the air when they explode on the Fourth of July. This explosion sounded like one of those starbursts that come at the end of the show as part of the grand finale, but when things blow up in Baghdad, nobody cheers or oohs and ahhs. In Iraq, a blast is a signal of death that causes our ears to perk. The explosion we heard was so big, it even shook the ground, bringing me back to the reality I had left for an interlude of daydreaming.

“Colt 9, Colt 9, we’ve been hit, we’ve been hit,” came squealing through the radio. My Sergeant was on the mike and the vehicle was moving. I was on the machine gun hanging out the turret like always, wondering what type of situation we were driving out to confront. I wondered if anyone had been killed while imagining the lurking possibility of my own death.

As we turned a corner on the country road surrounded by plowed fields, I saw the scene of the explosion. A suicide bomber had driven up to a patrol in a car loaded with six hundred pounds of artillery shells he had found in a nearby weapons factory. The rest is a story that can’t be pieced back together by any surgeon or narrator.

No one was moving in haste. Even though it was mid-day it seemed to be as silent as the calmest hours of the night. The men lingered around like they move at a funeral, slouched over, communicating grief through their eyes. Soldiers I didn’t recognize stacked bloody bodies on stretchers and loaded them onto Humvees. Once I saw passed the crimson stains, I could identify the dead as our men. Warm blood still rolled down their arms, and one guy almost slid off the stretcher, his leg flopping over the edge as they hoisted him up.

We lost eight men that day. Eight men in an instant. So much for my statistics.

The only thing I was counting now were the miles I had left to get to the border. There should be six hours of driving to go. We’re supposed to take a rest, but the Colonel wants us to keep moving. Right now, I don’t mind being pushed. Right now, I want to be pushed.

Soon the sun will be setting. It is out to my right as we travel south. When it finally starts setting, I am glad to see it go. In fact, none of us were ever happy to see it out here in the desert. Even at six in the morning when the air was cool and the atmosphere calm, the sun imposed its rays on us as it slowly rose. I knew I had to survive every day, one day at a time, and the sun was my pacesetter. It had to make its way across the expansive sky every day, being hated by all of us below. I would watch it, hoping it would move faster than it had the day before. It never did, and the days dragged on as I dragged my boots across the filthy streets of Baghdad.

But then the evenings came as a kind of relief. The night air in the desert is a luxury—perhaps one of the few things out there to enjoy. Things always seemed calmer at night. Even the explosions we’d hear at night sounded distant and nonthreatening.

Now I hear the tires on the road as they hum on the newly paved blacktop, leaving behind miles of rubber and memories. We paved these roads. It was one of the many things the U.S. had been spending trillions of dollars on. The amount of money spend on this operation was extraordinary. Trucks upon trucks would come into the country everyday, stacked with water, food, medicine, portable toilettes, water heaters, satellite dishes, and all the other crap it takes to keep soldiers happy and alive. As we got closer to the border, we could see all the trucks lined up, waiting to continue their trip north when the morning came and it is presumed safer to travel. The reality is that most the civilian contractors who bring supplies to Iraqis and American soldiers are more likely to get attacked during the day. Now, passing by truck, after truck, after truck, in a sequence that lasts five miles along the Iraq border, I hope their luck will get them to Baghdad and back as it has for me. It’s strange seeing them begin their journey where my will end.

A few moments later, the light from a city on the horizon comes into view. Our vehicles start slowing as the Colonel announces we can turn on our headlights which we usually keep switch off while driving in Iraq for concealment. My heart is racing and I am kind of nervous. After months and months in a country I had learned to make my detested home, I realized that I may not be ready to come back, and the separation might be harder than I anticipated. What would I say to my family when I was back? How silly their questions about my time in Baghdad would seem. What could I tell them? I think again, however, that it’s insane to imagine I’m not ready to go back. I must go back, even if the process of healing takes a lifetime. I must go back because out here, there are only more scars and a likely death.

As we approach the lights at the border, I suddenly remember all the joys I left back in the civilian world and get so exited I want to jump out of the truck and run the rest of the way, forgetting any obligations I may still have to the U.S. Army, Uncle Sam, freedom, or whatever other ridiculous concept, ideology, or personal ambition has kept me here. I think about all the things that would be waiting for me when I get back—my that family and friends; the music and food; the water and rain.

We finally cross the boarder into Kuwait, and I can’t believe I’ve actually made it this far. I know my life will never be the same. I know I will never see things the way I used to. I know I may have trouble explaining all this in the future, but for now, everybody is celebrating and congratulating each other, and as far as I’m concerned, the mission has been accomplished.