Attribution: Archangel12, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper’s status as a veteran has always been a complication for him, on the one hand the recognition and reward it garners from a grateful public and on the other, marking the keeper as having been duped by the ambitions of narcissistic elite into helping kill as many innocent strangers as possible in the interests of his loved ones’ survival.
Being a veteran first began its problematic dichotomous identity when there was a separation between those who declared war and those who carried the spears. Once the spear-wielding got delegated, elements like best-god, most-territory, biggest-castle and largest harem spawned early versions of the military-industrial-complex, and war became the favored pastime of the so-called most intelligent species on Earth.
As wars rage on in a half dozen global locations, killing thousands of men, women and children, being a veteran assumes a new description: someone lucky enough to have survived while those all around him were dying, who accepted training to become a killer of strangers on behalf of insufferable opportunists, who accepts the rewards of recognition and opportunity by a citizenry conditioned to support and honor the essential separation of the spear-makers and the spear wielders.
As one of the wielders, the keeper waves his GI Bill-sponsored diploma and salutes the VA Health organization for years of incredible care; and acknowledges that it was just dumb luck that made him a veteran and not a “KIA.”
Photo by Bill Stokes