I finally understand the desire of Kafka to have his final works be buried into obscurity with him. I am definitely an existential absurdist, but with this is a love for humanity and the world around me despite the pain that co-exists with the entire WTF aspects of living.
Heading towards Veteran’s Day 2018
I would like to thank those that helped me overcome a delusional level of guilt I have had about almost every aspect of who I am. To live is to detract from at least some level of life in the world around me. My experience after the military left me in the hands of an academic body with little real world experience to the reality it was critical of. They are like arm chair jockeys watching football. I was never a successful part of that or the military, but stuck between two worlds I didn’t feel worthy of when perhaps the desire to be worthy of living is the biggest irrelevant absurdity to living. We live and we die. We are selfish at times and altruistic at others. Neither saints nor sinners, we make choices when we’ve no clue what we are doing. Perhaps this latter part is the biggest curse of leaders when I’ve always felt like a child with no sense of control on a personal level.
One common thought in the social psychology among people superior to others at the time was that the military should have had a much bigger ground offensive and relied less on its air campaign. The belief was that the military should suffer heavy casualties as a cost for getting involved in the ethnic cleansing campaign going on in the former Yugoslavia. Americans were believed to not be able to take the level of casualties that this would result it. We needed to toughen up our stomachs first before we committed people barely out of high school to horrible deaths. Bosnia was for many seen as starting grounds for this toughening of spirit and it was failing to do so, because there was not enough killing and dying. From my perspective, I felt as if I should have died as I felt weak and inferior after being raised in a school system where children act like monsters to each other. We were taught to support the meek one day of the week and the other six days we were taught a misconception of evolution that made the goal of living to be some sort of Hobbesian take on social and personal goals of supremacy to reproduce and dominate as an alpha leader. This is a pretty shitty understanding of biology, which thrives on complexity, but from the minds of teachers who hadn’t gone through much intellectual rigor themselves, it was the ultimate knowledge to pass on to a bunch of insecure, hormonal brats determined to bully each other over their frightfully small world of experience and borderline/bipolar sense of personal worth. As gen-x moved on in life, it found itself without a sense of individual worth or social dignity as a whole. We were gen-x, because we were seen like a variable with an unknown value that would likely return as null. To see war as a way of establishing our value was insane. However the belief in war as a means of generational identity is perhaps one of the biggest aspects of mass social stupidity we have as Americans. So here we were; the generation of peace keeping missions that honestly was trying to do some good, but was criticized relentlessly for not dying and killing enough. It was a fucked up experience, and perhaps why so many of us simply turned to trying to obliterate our consciousness with alcohol and other drugs. I don’t doubt much at all that at least my drug addiction was fueled by depression and a personal sense of unworthiness to breath air.
While I seriously doubt in a decent state of mind that 9/11 was the result of a grand conspiracy or inside job, I do think that the government is sometimes infected with the belief that the individuals internally don’t have to really do their job or work very hard. I saw a lot of that among the government employees while working in DLA. I was very proud to be a contractor, as I felt we actually got the work done so the military really would get its supplies. This being said, the upper echelon of the military industrial complex do not seemed concerned at all with anything, but their own personal sense of self worth as demonstrated in their mind by their financial supremacy. I believed very much in my mission. So did most around me in my call center. It wasn’t that I liked the idea of enabling war. I like the idea of supporting people thrown into chaos that was pretty much not of their own making at all, but arm chair quarterbacks and greedy CEO’s. The government employees themselves often seemed to see their job as to support some level of corruption they don’t truly understand, or even personally give much of a shit about, either way. I definitely saw some of this apathy and social disregard thrown into the VA where doctors don’t generally believe they should bother to listen to patients at all… and I mean they don’t listen to a damn word. They just throw us on anti-psychotics and other mind altering substances hoping we’ll be drugged into submission, go insane for real, or just plain sleep to death. I don’t think the military would be happy if they knew how much of a recruitment deterrent it is to serve for anyone connected to the patients or volunteers that witness this social statement as to the lack of value to the life of a veteran beyond giving employment to some doctors who clearly would rather be doing anything, but their jobs. I watched the elderly thrown on anti-psychotics that were a death sentence and I don’t think at this point I was the victim of a conspiracy so much as incompetence and a radically lazy complete disregard for what should have been the duties of the job. I do think that most of the nurses themselves were often of good character, but I witnessed many torn between covering up for the rest of the staff and helping the veterans held captive of psychiatrists only there physically, but absent mentally. Between DLA and the VA, I came out with a completely different view than I went in as to the value of government services. There was little accountability and wide spread cover-ups of problems due more to complete apathy, than any even any truly dark kind of greedy corruption. The workers just didn’t seem to give a shit, and I think the military and veterans would be completely fucked if it weren’t for a minority of nurses, staff and military contractors determined to actually do the right thing. One of the few exceptions towards having a commitment to service I found among psychiatrists was a Muslim doctor from Pakistan. I thought this oddly poetic that someone many veterans would think they couldn’t trust based on demographic information was one of the few psychiatrists who earned a high level of respect from me. He was not snide intellectually and was amazing to talk to as a fellow autodidact. It was almost as if he was there to establish peace and reconstruct the views about how we should interact as human beings.
Joker's Wild 