Read on Twitter
I wanna extrapolate on this a bit, with a highly personal tale.
1/ https://twitter.com/fenrir_71/status/1305888534797127684
1/ https://twitter.com/fenrir_71/status/1305888534797127684
I joined the US army in '88, left for basic in '89. I joined because I had to get away from the highly abusive family I was in, both physically & mentally.
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And quite frankly when I joined I was ready to kill me some commies, al la Red Dawn. I was angry, and full of spite at the world.
Who better to take it out on than the Great Evil Empire right? I mean they locked their people up in gulags.
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Who better to take it out on than the Great Evil Empire right? I mean they locked their people up in gulags.
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And my early years in the army did not temper that outlook, if anything the very nature of dehumanizing our enemies enabled it. I thought that made me a good soldier, being full of hate and spite.
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But I was so very wrong, and it took war to show me that.
But not in the way you might think. Of course the carnage affected me in ways only war vets can understand, but that comes much later, after the battle.
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But not in the way you might think. Of course the carnage affected me in ways only war vets can understand, but that comes much later, after the battle.
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What really changed me was meeting the people in the theatre of war. The Berlin Wall came down literally just before my war. My war was in the middle east.
Growing up near a major city enabled me to not have the kind of bigotry towards those unlike me that so many have.
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Growing up near a major city enabled me to not have the kind of bigotry towards those unlike me that so many have.
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Dichotomous for a kid filled with hate & anger I know, yet there I was.
Maybe Full Metal Jacket taught me that one. Pop culture is king in the US after all.
More likely the kindness I'd always harbored inside was screaming to get out again after so many years of trauma.
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Maybe Full Metal Jacket taught me that one. Pop culture is king in the US after all.
More likely the kindness I'd always harbored inside was screaming to get out again after so many years of trauma.
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So my war was in the middle east. But my war didn't start right away. We sat in that hot ass desert for months, anxious and waiting for the go to wreak havok.
So I got time to get to know the locals, a rare thing for any soldier not explicitly in SpecOps...
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So I got time to get to know the locals, a rare thing for any soldier not explicitly in SpecOps...
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...which I ended up dabbling on the fringes of anyway.
What that time taught me was that people everywhere are the same, no matter the background. I remember vividly the first time I told a Philipino contractor in Saudi that I was from Chicago.
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What that time taught me was that people everywhere are the same, no matter the background. I remember vividly the first time I told a Philipino contractor in Saudi that I was from Chicago.
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"Bang-bang!! Al Capone!!" Was the reply I got. And you'd be shocked how many Jordan shirts I saw in Saudi Arabia, on children and adults alike. They knew us as well they could yet I knew nothing about them.
I had a kurd give me his prayer beads after a nice conversation.
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I had a kurd give me his prayer beads after a nice conversation.
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So in time I came to realize that the hate inside me resided in far too many Americans, the worst of it reserved for our own citizens.
In time I was able to let that anger go, though not for many years after the war.
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In time I was able to let that anger go, though not for many years after the war.
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And still today I fight it, that product of a horribly abusive childhood. I'm talking broken bones here folks, not just a smack on the head. Long nights of drunken angry parents, and habitual neglect.
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Even today I found myself thinking about a guy without a mask on, "I hope you die. AND your fucking family."
Because that hate inside is never gone. That fine line between good & evil resides in all of us; it sometimes only takes the smallest push to let it out.
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Because that hate inside is never gone. That fine line between good & evil resides in all of us; it sometimes only takes the smallest push to let it out.
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But what makes us better humans is that we quash that shit. We recognize that it's wrong to think in such a fashion.
We don't let others make us bad & we hold true to ourselves.
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We don't let others make us bad & we hold true to ourselves.
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So when I threaded about letting our hate go and being the better person that comes from deep inside me, where that struggle is real, daily & tangible.
I've lived what hate does to us, and I never want another human to live that way because it's self destructive.
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I've lived what hate does to us, and I never want another human to live that way because it's self destructive.
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That hate destroys societies as well, from the inside.
I look to others that are better than me for examples, like the BLM movement.
It'd be so easy for that community to come from hate, yet they don't. They just consistently ask for simple human decent treatment.
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I look to others that are better than me for examples, like the BLM movement.
It'd be so easy for that community to come from hate, yet they don't. They just consistently ask for simple human decent treatment.
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We could ALL learn a lesson from that. Well us white people at least.
Because it seems to me that perseverance for equality using strength through love is something the black community has figured out and we white people have not.
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Because it seems to me that perseverance for equality using strength through love is something the black community has figured out and we white people have not.
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So what I'm saying is use your good to change the world, not your hate.
Learn from your anger. Master it.
Don't let it master you.
Because hate only begets more hate, and hate is right under the surface, waiting for our anger to let it free.
<fen>
Learn from your anger. Master it.
Don't let it master you.
Because hate only begets more hate, and hate is right under the surface, waiting for our anger to let it free.
<fen>
