Americans don’t build their own lives, they build it based on what is pushed to them. They look for meaning in material things instead of searching inward. They are always searching outward. Grabbing at things that don’t necessarily fit, or they think they are entitled too. They see life as a gift but don’t treat it as such. It’s something that you can decorate and make pretty with materials to fill whatever spots they need but rarely ever do they actually live it. They’ll buy it though

He was killed because he challenged authority. Many people are used as examples to instill fear in others and keep them in check. That method never works for long. You will always have people who are not scared of the consequences of doing what is right.

EX: Billy’s treatment when he’s trying to sleep in the train and people keep telling him no, they don’t want to risk ruining their own small bubble of comfort to help someone who really needs it. No empathy or compassion is there for Billy from the others(1). When Billy tried telling Lily and Rumford he was there at Dresden but they dismissed him.

You are trapped in the past that acts as a cage where time moves forward but you don’t. You can watch everyone age and everyone can watch you, but you are unaware of yourself, time, and aging.

We take anything that we can from the dead and use it for our own personal gain/satisfaction. We take their prized possessions, their last words, their last wishes, and their memories. Yet we do nothing with the things that we take, except make ourselves feel good. When some of us encounter death, they are always pleased that it was the other person and not them. We use their stories of life and struggle and turn it into kind of lesson. We don’t truly honor the dead. We just see it as another milestone in life that we’ll reach someday as well. We celebrate the deaths of others while dreading our own. We make ourselves sick and miserable imagining the how and when. We forget how much we’ll be shared in our end. We forget that the passed should be celebrated. Just because their moment is gone doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it once more. It’s like the milestones that we reached in life don’t even matter anymore.

We as humans are always looking for reasons. Always looking for the why and the how, getting ourselves so hung up. Especially when it comes to war and life. Those who have never experienced talk about war from an intellectual standpoint. They only educate through books and think they know why wrong is wrong. They don’t bother to listen to real accounts and base their views on books alone. They are so blind to cyclical pattern that is war and its causes. War and death, the patterns are all the same. Senseless and unavoidable. We cannot avoid any of these things. Wars happen because greed will always exist in this world. We are trapped in this endless cycle of war and death. Time and time again, the conditions will repeat itself, because that’s what history does. We are doomed to repeat the bad just as we are blessed to repeat the good. We exist in the past, present, and the future. We exist in all time. You would think because we immortalize these conditions that we can somehow avoid them. But it’s only history to them but they are unaware that it will become a memory they wish to forget. They only live in these memories short term, the people who actually experienced, live in these memories all time. They are forever stuck. Like the bugs in the amber. We think we twist time to our will, force it to do our bidding, in order to achieve what we want. We focus so much on timelines and periods. When is the right time? Is it the wrong time? When will my time come? Am I going to do this in my lifetime? We do all this to forget we are stuck in the time that we are in. Times definitely change, but everything is cyclical. We keep learning that war is wrong but for some reason keep repeating. We only know it’s wrong because we say so. We are so stuck on our amber that we are blind to how much we are immersed in the amber of the past and of the one poured by your government. They will tell you that it’s all senseless violence when it is not. It’s premeditated and already justified. Death and the suffering of others okay because we all have to die someday. They will virtue signal all day long but do nothing to stand against it. Their fingers and eyes are ambered to the pages or whatever they are forced to see. They don’t listen to people who fought in the wars, only what is shown to them through books or propaganda. They call things that look vaguely correct on social media truth without ever looking deeper. They ignore the stories and accounts from people actually living. Anything to be able to explain away the guilt they feel for not helping or shedding light on issues they have the power to stop.

It feels like an attempt to take blame away from an entire group by giving them a nickname that sounds like it belongs to one person. Maybe it makes it easier to be mad at a whole group by lumping them into one persona. It kind of reminds me of calling people from the Middle East ” Hussain”

It’s like hearing ” thoughts and prayers” whenever there is a school shooting. It also just diminishes the hard work of others. That’s not to say prayers can’t be answered but there is hard work of another or someone else involved.

I don’t think most people or officials understand that we are losing our youth to these wars. As long as they are not the ones who’s fighting or their sons who are fighting, then the loss of your child is okay. We recruit these not even of high school children to fight for causes they know nothing about. They barely know about the world and are chock full of unchecked nationalism if they have not yet been jaded or scorned by life. Officials and your government bank on the hope of young children wanting to change to world and turn it into a nightmare.

This reminds me of a post that I saw where someone said ” Joy is a form of Resistance”. I think they failed to mention that the sentiment only works if you are also doing other things to resist. You are just going on about your life and feeling joy does nothing for the people actually suffering. It’s the same as being a performative activist. Posting yellow squares is not enough. Many Americans do not give a shit about things that don’t concern the country until their comfortable way of life is impacted. It’s dumb and it’s one of the reasons why people hate us overseas. Americans are selfish and only think of their own countries and lives.

One of the worst things to be is poor, outside of being a minority, being poor on top of that is the worst. Everyone hates you and thinks the worst of you. They don’t know you but they assume things about you. They think you don’t deserve the simple things in life like candy or entertainment systems. They police the kind of help you get and look down on you when you do. They only care about where their tax dollars are going when poor people are involved but not when the military spends every penny of their tax dollars or the government bails out other foreign nations. Poor people will always be outsiders looking in, even when they do get a little money, people police how they’re supposed to spend it because they think they know best. Everyone always thinks they know best when it comes to other peoples money, ignoring the societal and financial factors that we are operating under.

Death is scary to those who do not know how to cherish life. Those who have packed their life with real and true meaning know that death isn’t the end. It’s only a moment in time but they have learned that they exist in every moment of time. They are more alive in death than they’ll ever be in life. They able to reach places or rooms they’ve never been. Their reach is everlasting. They’ll live forever in the hearts of those who love them and in exist forever in thoughts of those who hate them or are intrigued by them. Some people can find joy in death. My family and I, while we are saddened by the passing of our loved ones, we celebrate and talk to them as if they are still there. Because they are. It’s simply that their moment is passing. When they’re gone, they’re gone but that moment will come around again. We will always have memories and can exist in those memories with them. Death is the one bead that’s always going to be on the thread of life and there’s not much you can do to change that moment.

Soldiers and Americans are conditioned to be a unit. Any personality that exist or they’re cultivating is beaten or persuaded out of them. It just turns them into perfect little soldiers or dumbing them down to consumer lapdogs who say yes to any policy change and don’t bat an eye. They are just weapons or means to an end