“Sometimes the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.”
And if the others learn from your mistakes, then perhaps your life had a purpose. Alas, when it comes to war at least, such learnings never stick. Consider Decoration Day, which was supposed to be a reminder that the Civil War had been a terrible, brutal thing and we never wanted to do this again, but quickly renamed Memorial Day and turned into a celebration of military power. Ditto Armistice Day, which started out commemorating the end of a war but quickly got renamed Veterans’ Day and re-invented as a salute to the military. The fiasco of Vietnam didn’t get its own holiday, and for a time it looked like the stark Vietnam monument in Washington might remind us to not do this again, but along came Hollywood and the whole “Rambo” mentality, to the point where the war’s pretty much been rewritten as something we were winning when those “liberals” (yeah, right, Tricky Dick Nixon was a liberal…) bugged out. And now, we have the very same bozos who turned out to be objectively, measurably, factually wrong about the Iraq invasion in 2003 being treated as “experts” on what we should be doing (more of what created the disaster in the first place, of course).
It’s been said that experience is a bitter teacher, but some will learn from no other. There are times I think even experience isn’t a bitter enough teacher for some folks.
“Sometimes the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.”
And if the others learn from your mistakes, then perhaps your life had a purpose. Alas, when it comes to war at least, such learnings never stick. Consider Decoration Day, which was supposed to be a reminder that the Civil War had been a terrible, brutal thing and we never wanted to do this again, but quickly renamed Memorial Day and turned into a celebration of military power. Ditto Armistice Day, which started out commemorating the end of a war but quickly got renamed Veterans’ Day and re-invented as a salute to the military. The fiasco of Vietnam didn’t get its own holiday, and for a time it looked like the stark Vietnam monument in Washington might remind us to not do this again, but along came Hollywood and the whole “Rambo” mentality, to the point where the war’s pretty much been rewritten as something we were winning when those “liberals” (yeah, right, Tricky Dick Nixon was a liberal…) bugged out. And now, we have the very same bozos who turned out to be objectively, measurably, factually wrong about the Iraq invasion in 2003 being treated as “experts” on what we should be doing (more of what created the disaster in the first place, of course).
It’s been said that experience is a bitter teacher, but some will learn from no other. There are times I think even experience isn’t a bitter enough teacher for some folks.