Memorial day.../sigh...again...and yet...

I went to church yesterday and sat in the pew with my wife.
Church is a moment where I escape from the world...well, as much as my fellow parishioners and pastor will conspire enough to allow me a moment to think in silence about something other than the world and how badly we're trying to bury it in ashes.
And so yesterday, conveniently in my own cocoon, safe within my intellectual walls of a congregation a betrayal occurred that one could say was quite like the Roman Senate and Julius Caesar.
Yes, the traditional Memorial Day Paen to all things military.
Fuck me.
I had forgotten.
Shit.
Yes...those were my thoughts...in church...and I'm sure G-d and I are going to have a long talk about my impatience with my fellow brothers and sisters...but seriously...of all places...in church?
"who do you remember on this day?" And of course, the Pastor whose brother served in Vietnam as a Buff pilot led the discourse on memories many lanes. So a video was played that tugged at the corner of ones eyes about a daughter whose daddy was dead in the ground all her life, but hey, writing letters to a dead person is emotional currency...especially for a video.
Well, everyones but mine because I'm thinking.
fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.
Sorry for the language, but this is what I was thinking in church...like I said, G-d and I are in for a long Q&A...I'm sure I'll he'll be tossing my Q's right back into my face so I can get my A's that I want...but right now...fuck me!
"freedom isn't cheap, and my daddy said there are somethings worth dieing for...like our freedoms."
What the fuck?
When were our freedoms ever jeopardized from an outside source?
The last existential threat to our freedom came from Britain in 1812, and let's be honest about that one...it really wasn't an existential threat to us as it was to rid the continent of an obnoxious pest who was making "claims" of ownership...the rest of the time after that we have been fighting for everyone else's freedom, or for our businesses to have the freedom to screw over another part of the world...but my freedoms, and yours?
No, sorry, the only existential threat to my and your freedoms, sunshine's, is the lot of you willing to use your freedom as currency for a mythical security you will never ever get!

So I'm sitting there fuming...and everyone is clapping for freedom to worship that was protected by a guy who has been long dead being written letters from a growing daughter who hasn't learned to let go, let the dead sleep in peace, and move on with her life?

I'm sorry, but this memorial day, for the first time, will not be punctuated by my traditional "thank you" to the vets because I'm replacing it with this thank you.

Thank you to all you vets who went into the den of the beast, saw it for what it truly, fucking is, and said, "fuck this!" and brought the message home to the rest of us that war has an appetite for stupid people.

Perhaps that will awaken our fellow citizens that the greatest threat to the freedoms they enjoy doesn't come from across the sea, but from their own brazen fear of loosing freedoms that they never really cherished to begin with.

And if Sunday, yesterday, taught me anything it is that Christians are leading the nation in the direction of being gutless cowards...willing to cashier anything and everything for some mythical security that we, of all people, should know doesn't come from man.

G-d, we can be so pathetically sad.