Sold Down the River

By: Richard Z

It's a cost almost no one is talking about.

You can go to the hospitals in Germany or Walter Reed, and you can see them, though no one else but their loved ones will.

The dead, it's horrendous that they died for this geopolitical merger and aquisition, but the dead have their peace; they have their comrades.

The blind, the crippled, the burned, the young men shitting in bags... they don't have anything. Those "crowds" of cheering "support the troops" people will move on to other things. There will be no parades for these young mutilated men and women when they finally get out of rehab.

No one will support them. None of these rabid pro-war fanatics will be there to help them bathe, crap, read a book.

Those Republican flag wavers will have moved on to more important things. Cutting "wasteful" government spending - like hazardous duty pay for combat soldiers, like Social Security Disability to pay for their crippled youngmen, like cutting benefits for the wives and children of these dead and crippled brave young soldiers.

The dead, at least, don't have to see what the people who killed them really feel about their expendable lives. The broken, the crippled, the maimed, the blind, burnt, disfigured are going to endure a life of knowing they gave up their bodies, their futures, their everything for people who never gave a shit about them at all.