A soldier, sailor, airman or Marine does volunteer to stand in harm's way. (It may be hard to believe, but any person who's at least 18 years old doesn't need a parent's permission to join up.) A volunteer must trust leaders not to squander their life for stupid reasons. These leaders should feel the weight of that decision, because each shattered, bloody body is someone's loved one. We trust them to keep those lives in their hands as safe as possible and spend them as miserly as they'd spend their own. I think one problem that has been made clear is that any appearance of a sense of respect for these warriors' lives beyond empty words, is not important to the current US regime.

There are, I think, two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are inpired by hope and dreams and love and light, and they try to find the good in people and situations and make things better. There are those who are inspired by hatred and anger and disdain, and they look for weaknesses and things to pick apart. They look for reasons to be furious and vengeful, and to shout at people and hurt people. They do these things because...hell, I don't know. Maybe it's the only thing they've learned proves they're here.

Most of us dip into both sides a bit. We can look for things to be angry about and then try to find a way to make life better. Some folks just like staying pissed off though, and some think that gives them an excuse to do stupid stuff. For example, it's obviously OK to drive a truck over symbolic representations of gravestones of the fallen. It's justifiable if the dead, their deaths and their loved ones' tears aren't quite as important to you as your anger and hatred.

Something Ghandi and Martin Luther King demonstrated was that you don't have to try much to defeat hatred. You just resist angry impulses, go on being visibly free of hatred and hate will eventually defeat itself.

And for something completely different: I wonder what the word 'vacation' is euphemizing, because the leader of the free world taking this much time off to just hang out on the ol' ranch really tests the public's gullibility. Even the ones that think Pro Wrestling is a sport.