Kansas City VA Medical Center, Kansas City, MO.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a smile.
I was sitting in the Silver clinic waiting area at the KCVA Medical Center today and got some really good news! Keep in mind that I was just a few dozen yards from the Hall of Heroes and fairly close to Valor Elevator. So this guy doing all the talking really seemed appropriate.
He was a severely overweight old fellow with a lot of bends in the wrong places, hair coming out in patches. Had the man next to me pinned to his chair as he went on bludgeoning the people of this country for not supporting the president more, for all the ‘snowflakes’ and cowards nowadays, and for the fact nobody is honoring our soldiers dying in these presidential wars.
Guy next to me, “I voted for Trump. I don’t regret it yet.”
“They complain about him going to Florida! Heck, Florida, at least, has a park where they honor the dead from all wars!” He named the park, and I went back to trying to read my book.
But then I got to thinking. All wars? Wow!
Anyway, I looked it up. He was right!
Field Of Honor Recognizes The Fallen From All Eras , Hillsborough Veterans Memorial Park.
By golly I think it’s about time someone honored all those fallen soldiers at Little Big Horn who got themselves killed trying to attack a lot more Sioux and Cheyenne than they thought were there. And all those twenty-five soldiers killed when they massacred all those people at Wounded Knee.
Heck, when you think about it, all those Indian wars have all sorts of fallen GIs who got themselves offed trying to kill Indians…… Apache, Navajo, Sioux, Cheyenne, Yuma, Ute, Comanche, Kiowa, Seminole. I’ve never heard one solitary soul stand up in front of a podium and pronounce how those men died for our freedoms. But without them we wouldn’t have farms and ranches scattered all over the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. And condos and resorts all over Florida. Those men died for our property rights.
And what about all the heroes who fell in the Mexican War when we were taking California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada away from the Mexicans? Nobody ever stands over their graves, stares at the flag, gulps, and talks about how they fought for our Constitution, our freedom of speech, our property rights.
Then there was the Spanish American War, where we took Puerto Rico, Cuba, and all her other possessions away from Spain …… and the heroes who died in that war for our property rights.
There’s just no getting around it. We’re falling down on the job honoring our fallen from all eras. Good thing someone is at least remembering the guys who died for our freedoms in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq one and two, and various other places in the Balkans, the Middle East, Korea, and Africa.
In fact, probably having someone stand in front of a podium and explain how all those guys were protecting our freedom would be a good place to begin. I’m inclined to think General Custer came about as close to protecting our freedom as anyone who died in a war after 1950.
Yeah, all those fallen heroes killed by Geronimo and Cochise won’t rest until someone honors them by explaining how they died for our freedom.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 
You do tell it like it is.
I try. Gracias, Old Jules
Nice post! You might like this one if you don’t mind me recommending one!
“Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”, by Jarred Diamond
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agriculture-worst-mistake/
Thanks Robert. Interesting article, too. I’m not sure anything that happened collectively a thousand times by communities can be called a mistake. I think of mistakes as choices individuals make, and I’m going to have to think a while before I can convince myself some composite of individuals doing things centuries apart spread all over the world can make a mistake. But it’s an intriguing thought.
Certainly men who abdicate their choices in favor of politicians, or some facsimile of politicians by serving in the armed forces of some country could be accused of something akin to a mistake. Even the ones serving countries with causes we find sympathetic. Thanks for the comment. Old Jules
Before agriculture we did not claim property rights. The only way to keep property is by force; police and military.
Civilization and city states emerged and the first economic system to be established was slavery. It was easier to capture slaves and stand over them with a spear than to do the back breaking work yourself.
This started the concentration of property and power first in states and then in empires. Both cities and empires exploit the surrounding countryside or countries and Chanel the wealth to the ruling class.
Organized religion took hold as a method of cheaply controlling populations where it took expensive armies to maintain the social structure!
It’s all been downhill since we stopped living as hunter gatherers. The North American Indian was the richest hunter gatherer society the world has ever seen. They had an eight hour work week. Think how many months that one buffalo would feed you and your family, and they had buffalo horizon to horizon! 😎
North American Indians covered the whole spectrum of social organization ranging from hunter-gatherers to pyramid building blood-thirsty priest-ocracies.
And most of them had slaves, no matter where they were located on the index of complexity for acquiring food and shelter. Nice supposition, though, and definitely worthy of some thinking. But I tend to think having a slave to get up and start the fire while you lie warm under your buffalo skin blanket in your teepee probably is more appealing to the aboriginal mind than getting up and doing it yourself. There’s no way of guessing how far back into human history slavery goes, but it’s easy to know how aboriginal you have to delve to find it. Which isn’t all that far. Thanks for the thoughts and words though. I plan to do a good deal more thinking about this. And I surely agree complexity in the social structure is a major factor insofar as ownership of something akin to wealth and the power that grows from it. Gracias, Old Jules
Control intensified with agriculture as did war and policing as civilization emerged.
We also unleashed a myriad of mismatch diseases when we adopted a diet based on cereal crops that are basically sugar based diets. And the over concentration of animals and humans produced a circumstance that was perfect for the Ascension of disease contagions.
I know a lot of people who work fifty weeks a year just to have two weeks living off the land; hunting, fishing, and camping…and it makes them feel good! In the old days this wasn’t a vacation it was living!
As Chief Seattle foretold the end of living and the beginning of survival!
Hey have you heard of Frederick Jackson Turner? I just discovered him looking up an academic with a similar name! Very interesting….
Interesting video. Brought to mind a movie from the 1960s https://youtu.be/ehcZMq7wVh8
Thanks!
Reblogged this on Seven Spheres and commented:
Riding and killin…ain’t much is changed…
Field hospitals and weaponry have changed a bit.
wow, the old go back to where you came from-by the way where is it? lol
I don’t understand the statement. I’m just an old country boy, myself. There are enough people where I came from already. They don’t need anymore old.
I meant, if everyone went back to where they came from (originally) where would we all be? Hypothetically, we are all mixed races if you ponder on it. Ancestry blood tests displaying on the results graph how mixed we all are….
Most of us came from pretty much where we are right now. People who preceded us in our family trees aren’t us, they are them, and for us to go back to where they came from wouldn’t represent a return. We’d have to come back here, where we came from. We’re born naked in all sorts of ways. Pretending we are other people who happen to be dead and who lived somewhere else doesn’t hold up under careful scrutiny. I came from where I was born….. Florence Nightinggale Hospital, Dalas Texas, back mid-way through WWII. Anything that happened before that didn’t happen to me. It happened to someone else. Old Jules
I agree, so why do so many people say to others go back where you came from, just because they have a different language, although they were born in their current location or at least nearby…
Human beings are tribal animals. ‘I’ seems a weak and lonely place, so they invent collective words and phrases such as ‘us’ and ‘we’. Then they shout their opinions at the world around them packaged in collective rhetoric in hopes of providing missing substance. If I order you to go ‘back’ somewhere and I am stupid I’ll believe I’m fortifying my own position of ownership by my implied authority to order you away.
Thank you for those words. You are correct in my view. I appreciate all your insight.
No doubt about it, where oh where would we be, without the Great Civilization that was carved from Indian lands?
About where we’d be without the great civilization the Saxons carved from the lands of wossname, those folks who painted themselves blue, I reckons. Or land the Romans carved from the Gauls. Old Jules
So glad you’re back!
Likewise. Old Jules