Realization

This has been a particularly tough week for me for some odd reason. Bad enough that I am heading for California to seek counsel from a trusted friend and mentor. In this week I have had to deal with some unsavory people, had the realization that my former Division Commander is one of a small minority to call for the SecDef’s resignation and come to full grips with just how far out there we have come as a nation.

I am referring to the events in California, which I might add occurred a few weeks ago (oddly enough while I was out there visiting). In this situation I am witness to an event where the sovereign of my nation, our flag, has been usurped and violated by the flag of a two bit, half-witted nation that daily sends thousands of felons into our country with the tacit approval of its own president. For what it is worth, the instituion 'hosting' this lovely expression of foreign patriotism, Montebello High School, states that its students were under lock-down at the time and it was Whittier students that used their pole. Nice.

I notice that Montebello is part of the 'accomodation' band wagon in that it has a dual language website. Maybe someone might have thought that the logical extension of accomodating felonious immigrants in our country by using their langauge might ultimately result in them assuming that we welcomed their path toward US residency and therefore they have every right to fly their flag over our own. Why is it that everybody but the people involved can see this clearly? Why should a US High School need to have spanish on its website? Don't US high schools teach in English?

What is going on?!?

Hundreds of thousands of US veterans are now privileged to be living in a country where we tolerate our flag being subverted by another nation’s. I am sickened and I am disgusted. I am wondering how these images were ever allowed to come into existence. I can flat out tell you that there would have been none of this had my battalion been near that high school. There would have been one of two things; high school students standing outside a perimeter formed by very determined soldiers protecting our flag or bloody and messed up high school students crawling toward a perimeter as a group of very determined soldiers kicked the living bejeezus out of them. I personally would have taken that godforsaken rag they call the Mexican flag and wiped every sweaty aspect of my body, followed by my backside and then politely shredded it and tossed it back to them.

There would have been no nonsense like this on my watch.

During my time in Iraq we were forbidden to fly the American Flag over our forward operating bases. It was not permitted. We were not to be seen as occupiers in Iraq and therefore the stars and stripes remained in our quarters and hidden but to us;

I developed a tremendous lover for my nation’s flag when I was deprived as a soldier in harm’s way from seeing it flying above me. I love my flag so much today that the one I flew in Iraq (I’ll deny I did it til questioned at which point I will proudly state that I, as a deployed American warrior, flew an American flag over my quarters one day and photographed it to show that I followed my nation’s call all the way to Iraq) flies in my office and so does every flag that has followed me elsewhere, Kosovo etc…

Meanwhile, back at home, the Mexican flag is flying over my own and my flag is flown in a position indicating distress or emergency… …Emergency, yep I’ll say.

"No great nation has ever been destroyed by a foe from without which has not already destroyed itself by corruption within." (Unknown)

I wish that I knew who to attribute this quote too. It is telling and true and we had bettered get this one right or we are going to lose California simply through reproduction. Mark my word every illegal that enters that has a kid on our dime generates a child that WILL fight against US sovereignty and for his own people. One day the Californians will simply open the border and then it is done. I shudder to think about what will happen when a state becomes sympathetic to the aggression of the Mexican government and opens the gates completely. What will be our response?

Complacency is fatal. We are complacent about the borders. We are complacent about our energy policy, we are complacent about the intrusion, under the guise of “national security”, upon our individual liberties. The TSA couldn’t find bomb-making materials at 21 of the 21 airports that there were passed through

http://hsc-democrats.house.gov/HS/Press+Releases/2005/GUNS+KNIVES+AND+BOMB+MAKING+MATERIALS.htm

and frankly this doesn’t surprise me. But yet instead of a national uproar we still tolerate the idiocy of taking off our shoes and playing games at metal detectors. No national public service announcements to teach a people about simple security measures but we can all take off our shoes, even little old grandmas.

I walked into my children’s school today to find a bunch of Malaysians carrying bags and taking pictures ostensibly under some local college exchange and conflict resolution program. I went to the principal and asked her if she thought it was a good idea to have people who hail from one of the most militant Islamic nations in the world carrying bags and taking photographs of children and rooms in her school. We had to get into some specifics about dead Russian school children in Chechnya before the light finally started to flicker in her brain.

The issue in her mind was ‘discrimination’. I was incredulous. She actually told me that the visitors knew it was against the law to use photos of kids for any purpose without permission from the parents. I about lost it. When I finally said, “Just for your information, they took the photos with digital cameras and those photos could well be in Jakarta right now and you have no idea what they might be used for.” She looked a little pale and finally stopped telling me “I know, I know, I know.” Yep she ‘knew’ everything about security until my words finally triggered the realization that her lack of knowledge just compromised her school’s security and she might well be the head of the next Beslan Elementary School.

Blows the mind.

Yep, only in America and largely because a lot of US troops are overseas. After wiping my backside and tossing the Mexican flag I would have plainly and solemnly folded the American flag and raised instead the Gadsden Flag, preferably the Navy Jack. I flew it at my house for a while after the SecNavy ordered it flown on navy ships. You know the flag, the one with the “Don’t Tread on Me” and the snake. I find it very appropriate. My wife thought it too militant for the relatively liberal town we live in and so I took it down. But it is exactly the message that I want sent to people who might seek to do harm to us. In fact, if and when I head for Iraq or Afghanistan again I am taking one of those and flying it as well.

While we are worried about Iranians, we completely forget the lessons of the day. The odds of the Iranians developing a functioning nuke in the next five years, not even addressing the ability for them to actually deliver it, is a very big long shot. You cannot just walk down to the local Home Depot and whip up a nuke that works. You have to enrich at least 100 pounds of uranium to weapons grade Uranium 235, you have to then design as sophisticated a conventional bomb as exists to properly seat the uranium in a critical mass either through an implosion or gun type device. You have to have the expertise to test the device. You don’t just go out and buy things like Berylium at the local Lowe’s. People tend to notice when someone inquires about such things.

Put out a bulletin board message and tell the world that you are looking for some high-speed switches and I GUARANTEE your name is going into an FBI database. Someone will start investigating you. Whether or not the TSA could identify the switches as they past through their inspection stations is highly suspect after their recent evaluation, but the FBI WILL start looking into such things.

The point is that every western country in the world has a vested interest in knowing exactly where the Iranians are in their efforts to build their own nuke and every western intelligence agency will share their findings with one another to contain that threat. Bank on it. Iranians do not scare me; American complacency in the light of vast and clear and horrific and deadly lessons scares me very much.

What we don’t know is when the next group of disgruntled radical Islamic homicidal maniacs is going to strap a bunch of hard-to-track conventional explosives onto Abaya-clad women and parade them into one of our schools or shopping malls. These are lessons we should have well in hand, especially when Abaya-clad people are walking around schools taking pictures and carrying large gym bags. But along with allowing little jerk-offs to fly foreign flags we also seem to be perfectly comfortable with not asking other potential jerk-offs to leave bags and cameras in their cars when we let them waltz into our elementary schools.

Discrimination has nothing to do with anything. When the body parts are scattered around and the CNN trucks are 10 deep in your parking lot and the thirty microphones and screaming parents are wailing in your face, the fact that you chose not to eye-over the people walking into your neighborhood will seem as far from discrimination as Swiss-cheese. Again, we have a foreign flag being flown above our own and we might well have digital photos on their way to Jakarta. I think it is well past time for Americans to understand that this war is on our soil and it aint leaving. It doesn’t matter if you live in Denver or Smallville, we are all ‘targets’ for people who hate us and our way of life.

The answer is to reclaim our flag, reclaim our standards and flat out become intolerant of any behavior that is clearly threatening, potentially or actually, to our safety and sovereignty.

I spent over a year of my life away from my country to protect a flag I wasn’t allowed to see fly above me. I did not do that to come home and find that my countrymen and women allowed that same flag to be replaced by that of another country. Think about it.