Stuff I Don't Usually Talk About

Not Braggin'...Just Sayin'...


I'm sitting around here this morning waiting on a couple of things to happen regarding paperwork and the Internet and project stuff, and I keep glancing with one eyeball at FOX News' coverage of the hellish situation going on down in Haiti since the Earthquake.

I can't even begin to tell you how my heart goes out to the private citizens of that country, and the amount of anger I feel toward the corrupt, abusive government and government "officials" which in past and present administrations have taken advantage of and in the process neglected innocent men and women and children over the past 200 years the country has been free from the French.

The song lyrics from Janice Joplin comes to mind saying "Freedom's just another word for...Nuthin' left to lose" when it comes to thinking about Haiti.

And I have to ask where Jessi Jackson and Al Sharpton and all of our other demagogue "race war-lords" are when stuff like this happens outside of Watts or Harlem or anywhere USA and the leaders are BLACK taking advantage of other BLACKS?

The scenes of people digging through the rubble of crushed houses and apartments and hospitals and orphanages with their bare hands has brought back to me this week some uncomfortable memories of my time spent in the Philippines back in the late 1970's while that country was still under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos.

Like Haiti today, the Philippines was and is a country of vast social and economic stratification, with a very thin upper class and almost as thin middle class sitting over and around a giant group of people living in abject poverty--which when I was there meant living on less that $1000 per year.

They would offer to sell a young Midshipman in the US Navy EVERYTHING and ANYTHING for any minimal piece or part of the equivalent of $18,000 per year stipend we earned while wallowing around on a ship in Subic Bay on our summer orientation cruises.

Any way, it was Monsoon season while I was there stationed on the USS New Orleans LPH-11 Amphibious Assault Carrier (a boat load of "Squids" and "Jar Heads" and clunky helicopters) and it rained almost every day and some days it rained so much that the sides of the surrounding mountains would get so wet that they decided to slide over and cover the crude roadways carved out between the little towns and villages surrounding the Naval and Air Force Base.

They had this one big rain and mud slide and word came out for volunteers to go help look for survivors and dig people and some cars and a bus and other stuff out of the debris.

I went.

I lasted a half day.

After hitting a dead woman in the head with a shovel before excavating the rest of her body and finding a purple colored cold wet tattered kid--striking him in the arm and making a cut that didn't bleed--I had to leave the recovery effort along with several other young 19 year old men because it was obvious there were no survivors and the more experienced guys were tired of watching us suffer in an operation which was beyond our capacity to process mentally and emotionally.

They let me leave on the first truck out, and I hate to admit that I was actually glad to get out of that situation because I guess I was just not up to it all in the end.

In my considered Redneck opinion, it's real easy to sit around and watch TV and pontificate about how you would do things in any given situation, but I'm here to tell you that what's going on down there in Haiti right now would drive most average Americans mad, and I'm fairly certain that most of the idiots we've elected to our House and Senate would run screaming from the scene if they actually had to face the realities on the street there.

And still, look at the fundamental, critical, vital role that the US and the US Military is playing... and how utterly useless the United Nations is in this process, and then please consider reality rather than wish for "hope and change" the next time you go to the polling booth to vote in an election.