Hope and Change?

Remember these clouds from a previous post?

I awoke this morning with a discomforting thought burning in my head. Vietnam: but why Vietnam, why now?

Forty two years ago I was serving in Vietnam. I had to use my calculator to be sure it was really that long ago. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday. Forty six years ago I had all sorts of dreams and hopes. Sounds vaguely like a campaign slogan doesn’t it! But our government had bigger ideas for me than going off to college to study art. Better ideas for all of my high school chums. There was a nice little war going on in South East Asia and we were all invited. Well not exactly invited, our presence was commanded. I was 19 years old and the only control I had left over MY life was to choose whether to wait for the draft to send me to war or volunteer to go to war and kill people who had never harmed me or anyone else in the USA. Well actually there were two other choices. I could desert to Canada, disgraced and never to return, or I could go to prison. Oh if I had been wealthy or connected I could have bought my way out of the draft like some of our illustrious politicians or patricians.

Flash forward forty two years and I realize with blunt force trauma the irreconcilable wrongness of the Vietnam mandate and the one we are about to face in the coming weeks. We are being threatened with buying government mandated health insurance or imprisonment? Will we bow to this as business as usual? People this is not about health care, it is much more important than health care! What will come next? Buy a GM (Government Motors) car or go to prison? Work in a government mandated job, at a mandated wage? Will you be subjected to obligatory volunteerism, or face prison? After four years of my life were stolen by my government I vowed I would never permit anyone to exercise that much control over my life again. Never! What our nation is facing is a lifetime of mandates, life controlling, life killing, government mandates. I wonder where the other thousands of disassociated Vets stand on this issue? I love this country but people WAKE UP! Wake up now or wake up in chains! This is the ugly truth of the hope and change we were promised. This is the Obama legacy.