1975
It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years: food... Now what do you think the people are going to want us to do then? ... Ask them when people who've never known hunger start going hungry... They won't want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it for them!
Redford walks the spook in front of the New York Times.
Spook: You poor dumb son of a bitch! It didn't have to end this way... Hey, Turner! How do you know they'll print it? You can take a walk. But how far if they don't print it?
Redford: They'll print it.
Spook: How do you know?
2013
Did you hear the one about how American troops murdered four women and five children in Iraq in 2006, including a woman over 70 and an infant under five months old, with all the kids under five? All of them were handcuffed and shot in the head. We later called in an airstrike to cover it up, apparently. But it barely registered a blip on the American consciousness.
What if it we're forced to look at all of this for real next time, and what if it turns out we can't accept it? What if murder and corruption is what's holding it all together? ...this is going to be the implicit argument from the secret-keeping side when this inevitable confrontation comes. They will say to us, in essence, "It's the only way. And you don't want to know." And a lot of us won't.
1974
It's a shock that "The Conversation" was finished months before Watergate, but should it be?
This is America for the entirety of my life, and my country since more recently.
The last vid on that page was helpful in understanding... understanding on a personal level. I had a friend in Iraq who came back full of bravado, but on quiet nights on the porch having a beer with no small talk... the real talk would come out. It always started with 'joke' stories about shooting livestock. If your reaction was too adverse there the stories would end. But if you stayed nice and quiet, he would unload.
ReplyDeleteHumans are resilient but you never bounce back without some scarring. If you bounce back at all.
At least twenty years ago, when more were still around, I had the chance to talk to two WWII vets who should not have made it. One, a fine gentleman who'd been in the 10th Mountain Division in Europe. Another, a more working class type whose Canadian unit had been attached to Marine landings in the Aleutians. Even in my callow youth I knew enough to ask few questions, shut up and listen. However, that was a 'just war'... after a fashion.
DeleteDon't know what I'd say to your friend, or if I'd stay to listen. A lot would depend on your friend. But the war was in no way just, so all the deaths are murders. No child of mine will join a military, police force or surveillance agency, if he wants anything from me ever again.
My mother forbid it as well. Six kids to a single mom, she could have gotten our schooling paid for by the good 'old US of A. But she valued us too highly and had us work hard to pay for our own, if we chose higher education.
DeleteI commend your stance sir.
I commend your mother's, and yours. More sacrifices than I ever hope to have to make.
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