200,000 Reasons

I stayed up and watched Nightline last night and was stunned to see U.S. soldiers actually interviewed and allowed to speak their minds about their deployment. What they said should have been the lead story on the nightly news and it should be every night until the reality of the evil we have perpetuated on the people of Iraq becomes a lived reality for J.Q. Citizen. I predict that the war in Iraq will only end when Al Queda (sic) manages to get off another round and people realize that the great distraction in Iraq made that possible. We have killed, by official estimates, around 200,000 people in Iraq by "accident" or "because that's what happens in war." Every person we kill now, given that the Iraqis want us out, is a new point of hate directed at every American. It doesn't matter what our intentions are, it doesn't matter how hard we try to only kill the "bad guys;" we are completely fucked because we cannot get people to love us with violence. Rules and logic are not applicable when you use high explosives and lead as a policy device.

On a completely different level yet analogous plane I took my son's Frisbee group to their first Goaltimate tourney. And the ugly head of a twenty-six year old coach appeared with just the same indifference that his brethren's indifference to understanding why they should protest this illegal/immoral war. Our team was seeded 4th out of 5 teams and the 5th team was made up of Junior High students. We, lost to the eventual winners first, then to the kids coached by the gen-X tool. Game three was a battle with a group of high schoolers who were directly linked to the junior high team by family and location. So, as often happens with rookies, they got to a point where neither team could score and our team was down 1-0 in the series and tied 2-2 in the second game which was running "late." Tool boy starts pestering me while I am watching the game about capping it because his team needs to play the winner of our game (maybe not given the vagaries of point differential and bullshit). I am incensed by this. But I acquiesced. So we basically forfeit and let the other team go play pussboy's team. Now we start playing the junior high school kids and they are very good. They win the first game 5-4 and our team is exhausted. But I tell them that they can win if they decide they want to because I know they are bigger and stronger and eventually they will wear out the other team. I tell them this while they are winning the second game 2-1 I think, and they hear me. I can't tell you how proud of them I was as they fought back on pure heart to force a third game.

Pussfuckhead comes back during this second game, which we eventually won 5-4 on a diving catch in the endzone, and says (and I knew he was coming back because I have had to deal with his lawyer ass before) "are we going to cap this game" to which I say "no" and "I don't like you." I wanted to be a violent man right then, but alas I am not. Lucky for me the other captain was in complete agreement. Referring to our boys he says, "This is their playoff game." Exactly. Shithead's team had of course beaten the older siblings of the team we were playing before but got killed in the finals. There had been no talk of caps in the captain's meeting and for jesus fucking christ's sake its about all the damn kids, not just the elitist fucking kids. This yo-ho had the temerity to say (during the first time cap episodie) that the reason we had to follow "the schedule" was because it wouldn't be right to cut into "parent time" should the event run long. To all the helicopter parents, Reaganite hellspawn and general over-competitive fuckheads: may your children volunteer for an illegal war. Because its you fuckers that have made this great country into the cowardly shitbrain-lead nation it is today. Cowardly not because the boys killing and dying over there are cowardly, but because of all the rest of the folks who can't stay up late enough to understand that we lost the war in Iraq when we illegally invaded it. And following schedules, timelines, and whatever else is so god damn not the issue that I can only imagine disaster being the reality this stupid generation of coddled idiots needs to see the folly of their ways.

The tournament finished early BTW. This war is going way fucking overtime. I hope it doesn't cut into too much "parent time."

Missing Children

Yesterday I played some Goaltimate with my son and his friends and a nearby park. This park is frequented by a lot of folks walking their dogs and sits adjacent to an elementary school that my kids once attended. It was 4PM when we went out there and we played for two hours, taking frequent breaks for water as we had only one sub per team and it was hot as hotcakes out there. Humid too. Anyway, the remarkable thing about our presence there in my mind was that we were the only damn people there pretty much. A couple of dog walkers and a couple of teenagers went by but that was it. The playground stayed mostly empty. There were no kids less than 12 anywhere. What gives? I mean its fucking summer and I know there are some little kids in the area. And some medium sized ones too.

Sure, its probably just that mommy and daddy both work and they send their kids to daycare or grandma's. Or it might be that per capita we have not as many of these types of children around. But I really think that here in the land of constant beautiful daytime the kids spend most of their times huddled around electronic campfires of one type or another. Couple that with the rampant ubiquitous paranoia that seems to have gripped the age and voila, no kids are alone with their dreams anymore. The boogy man doesn't just come out at night anymore, he drives a panel van during the day and tries luring helpless suburbian offspring into lurid dens of genital perversion. Or worse, they might end up on a milk carton.

I fucking ran wild as a kid. I was riding my bike to school at 7 or 8, a latch key kid by the same. I communicated with my folks by landline. I never ever had any perve try to fuck with me. No broken bones. No arrests until 18. No felony convictions to this day. It just seems that these "helicopter parents" as they call them are such a bunch of pussies that we end up living in these suburbian enclaves of bad imagination, trying to "protect" our charges from monsters of our own furious and hallucinatory design. Bad shit happening is always top level news, and if any predator or rapist nails a white girl its a fucking national story. Meanwhile the places of darker hue get drive-by talleys and back page reports that are code for "gangs" which means "what the fuck do you expect to get in the ghetto anyway, those people are animals." Anyone born after say 1978 as far as I can tell has about a one in four chance of knowing a damn thing. The Reagan revolution guarenteed that these cloven hooved progeny have lived in a bubble of such a red hue that they can't see certain colors because those rods and cones have been burned out by the overdose of bad imagery that is the legacy of our media age.

The Goaltimate kids play without adult supervision most of the time. They screw around, play hard talk shit, suggest impossible anatomical mixings and question their friends masturbatory habits. They don't do drugs, or drink. They get ridiculously high grades. And they are not as integral a part of the overarching average of coersion and control that those kids stuck at home or stuck at practice often are. Freedom might happen for a few of them. Few of the safe kids have much of a chance at freedom at all.