I joined the military so I could go to college without having massive debt weighing on me like so many of my friends and peers. I graduated in the top 50 of a senior class of about 300; the salutatorian(however the bloody hell you spell that) somehow has a good $60,000 debt. Probably just because we are from El Paso or something, and have a record for not having great schools. I dunno.
But I decided to sell my conscience for college, and sold my body to the government. And I've watched Syria and Libya go up in flames under a feckless Secretary of State. I like to assume ignorance rather than malice, and I'm trying to not be cynical-- but I don't think anyone can blame me. Since I was able to actually vote, I've tried hitting the streets to put Democrats in power, without really
researching what they were about. Fuck, when Clinton announced she was running for President, that first day, I had a momentary Pavlovian reaction. I heard the bell, and I started drooling.
But then I started researching. The more I dug up, the more disgusted with myself I felt. Here I am, a biracial black and white guy in El Paso, Texas-- now stationed out in Virginia-- reading about all the shit Clinton has done that I can't condone, and I felt
disgusted. Name recognition alone nearly made me sell my conscience for the second time in 3 years.
Given her foreign policy track record? If Clinton or any other Republican comes into power, there's a good chance that I will be expected to kill. Terrorists, I have no issue with. Hell, we made that bed in the Seventies, if not earlier-- it's fucked up that the younger generation has to contend with that, sins of the father kind of thing-- or in this case, I suppose it's more "sins of the country". But what I can't abide, is that we may be sent to kill innocents. She's voted for that kind of thing before. Slinging around military power is the heaviest thing that a President could consider doing-- and I'll be goddamned if I vote for someone who might put myself or my countrymen and women back in the situation of having to kill innocents and be told we're making America a safer place, only to be lining some fuckin' bureaucrat's pockets. I'll close with an excerpt from a track that just seems to sum up the days I'm living in.
"You are the smoldering vessel of punishment born to do nothing but justify us;
Give us your empathy we’ll give you lust, let yourself go my son time to grow up.
Give up your childish obsession with questioning anything we don't tell you is irrelevant;
Everything you've ever been is replaced by the metal and fire of the weapon you clutch."