When Veterans take an oath to swear their lives to the service of the United States, we do it with the intention that we are protecting the American way of life. We do this so one day our children might not need to. We give up our freedom so that our country can enjoy theirs. Oftentimes we are swearing this oath when we are still children ourselves. Unaware of the harshness and reality of war. Unaware of the true nature of why we are putting ourselves in harm’s way. We do to fulfill a family legacy, because the recruitment commercials promise us the opportunity to see the world and gain experience, or because we feel compelled to do so out of a homeland security trigger that impacted us on American soil.
Whatever our reasoning, it never prepares us for the outcome of what we signed up for. Are veterans trained in the event of capture? Yes, absolutely. We all feel so strong and know that we were trained to be able to psychologically handle torture or whatever our possible captors could and would throw at us. Then one day as you are going about your normal routine, ambush, capture, and then torture. How long can you expect the training you got on scenarios to sustain a young person who barely just became an adult?
This is in no way to take from those who have been caught, maliciously tortured, then returned to their country of origin. Maybe you held strong. Maybe you went to a place where you couldn’t be hurt, or maybe you never got to come home to tell the tale. We can’t judge a person’s actions without living their experience alongside them. This young man was tortured for 5 years and then the Obama administration swapped his life for the lives of 5 Taliban captives. His one life for the life of 5. Seems a little unbalanced, but I am not privy to the circumstances of his release.
Now Bergdahl is facing desertion charges, a court martial, and some jail time. He had 5+ years of his life stolen and we are going to take more? Hardly seems fair. I feel this guy has dealt with enough. I understand that lives were supposedly lost in the pursuit of him when he went missing…but the details of how he went missing have not been revealed, so I’m not convinced he just ran off into the Mountains of Afghanistan to flee his post. I was there, too. I served a deployment in Afghanistan and I know what that feels like. It’s hard to be away from home, it’s hard to look around and feel like you are in a prison camp of your own country’s design. Would anyone just walk out the front gates and decide it was a better idea to mingle amongst people who didn’t want us there to begin with? Probably not the best idea. Again, I don’t know where this guy was mentally when he disappeared…I also don’t know for a fact that he wasn’t forced to go. I think in some cases we look to punish people because we feel an injustice of some kind before we know the facts.
New Bergdahl letter outlines torture by Eric Bradner, Barbara Starr, and Ed Lavandera, CNN
I hope Bergdahl gets heard. I hope he is shown compassion. I hope most of all that he finds healing.
Earth Hour: March 28 at 8:30pm
What will you be doing tonight at 8:30 pm? Earth hour started in Sydney, Australia in 2007 as a collaborative effort to address the changing climate. To date, Earth hour is the largest environmental movement in the world. Participants range from the United States, England, Cambodia, Cameroon, Australia and many more.
The Eiffel Tower will go dark, Buckingham Palace will darken, even the Golden Gate Bridge will exist in darkness for one hour. The Empire State Building in NYC will “reduce their light to a sparkle in honor of Earth hour”. Earth hour is a demonstration of what people with passion can do to create waves of change. What may have started out small, has grown to the largest grassroots movement globally.
Earth hour may seem like a small thing to do for Gaia, but imagine if the majority of the world came together to shut lights off for 1 hour a month, 1 hour a week, or even 1 hour a night. We could preserve our world and create a ripple of change to really push for sustainable and clean energy.
I urge you all to light some candles and enjoy a cozy hour of bath time or another activity that you enjoy doing by candle light. If you don’t need light for anything, go outside and look to the sky there is always free energy to observe and you may even catch a shooting star.
Thanks for Nothing
While most people are contemplating the big questions in life, what is my purpose?, why is there pain?, who or what created the universe?; I was pondering something else. Not who or what is the basis of the universe and our existence, but who or what created what created us. Where is the absolute origin point? Perhaps it is nothing.
In my post yesterday I said that if nothing is everything, then everything is nothing. Funny how synchristic our thoughts and feelings can be sometimes because today that statement led me to this article:
Why is there something rather than nothing? Presented by Robert Adler, BBC
Astrophysicists have discovered that all objects in space are moving in an expansion. The universe is always expanding. This being true, at one time it must have been closer, but how close? If we think of the smallest particle that makes up the elements, we are looking at the atom. Digging deeper into that we are looking into quantum particles and the desire for scientists and physicists to marry the idea of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity. So far, we have not been able to come with with a seamless relationship between the two.
I pose this thought, what if the Universe, multiverse, all galaxies in creation were once a super tiny particle that just reached a critical mass to expand into our current universe? Where does the Universe end, if it even does? It could very well be possible that there are other universes at the birth of creation right this very second.
How much energy would it take for a small quantum particle to expand out to what we know now as our reality…where did that quantum particle come from? As this article suggests, it likely came from nothing.
We are far greater beings than we have been told, far greater beings than most of us realize.
Enjoy your Journey and I’ll catch up with you next week,
Lindsey