Dear America, I Finally Figured You Out

"Truth is life."
Frank Lloyd Wright

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that more than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years -- “packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes.” Only so much of that could be drug money. The bulk, presumably, was skimmed from U.S. aid and logistics spending.

And that’s just what people are declaring. The Journal calculated the $3 billion figure based on Afghan customs records, noting: “More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide.”

The actual amount of money flown out of the country is, of course, higher. As the Journal noted: “One courier alone carried $2.3 billion between the second half of 2008 and the end of 2009, said a senior U.S. official, citing other documents that are in the possession of investigators.”

It took me a while, clinging naive sot that I am but suddenly it all made sense to me. I saw this headline on the billions being wasted in Afghanistan - certainly not the first nor last of such stories - and I knew it would pass by with about as much interest as yesterday's weather report. Nobody cares, we already know. Why even report it? We have our lies and we're sticking to them. Facts are for the foolish and the unwitting (say the foolish and the unwitting).

Fact is the wars we wage are unholy and impure. Fact is we are bankrupting ourselves in every sense. Fact is we are forfeiting our future to supplant our unsustainable lifestyle today. Fact is no system can compensate for greedy hearts. Fact is we're dying, putting our brothers in the streets for no reason - both here and abroad. And the fact I finally figured out today: we want to die. America has a death wish. Go ahead, report all the negative stories you want.

Arguing against responsibility is like arguing against gravity: whether you believe in it or not you are still beholden to its demands. So while I don't refute for a minute the great amusement derived from those who say gravity does not exist - that they claim they can leap off tall buildings without a scratch - it's when lives are put on the line for faith in such lunacy that the whole thing turns nightmarishly tragic. Unspeakably tragic. History will paint us as no better than the Nazis, killing millions in misplaced anger. I know we've convinced ourselves otherwise.

The lie remains the same: "Work will set you free"

Guilt is the soil and seed of any death wish. America will stoop to any low (but give up her sins) to show her ways are good and true. You must trust us! We believe in a magic god that says what we can convince others to believe is the only reality that exists. How utterly humiliating. Trace the downfall of any civilization and the story is painfully the same. How very boring. We tell ourselves we've cleverly learned to live without an open heart or an open mind. How I laugh at you!

Now I will speak the truth we all know is true. The truth we rape by calling it a lie, an impossibility. But the truth is this: things don't have to be the way they are. Nothing stops us from obeying the laws of nature. We can clean up this planet, forget the rule of fictional money, serve selflessness instead of selfishness (it's human nature to be selfless, you lying idiots) and create a future for ourselves as rock solid as the heavens above. These things sit before us and yet we reject them. Why? Because we have a death wish!

So goodbye America, you had a helluva run. I will watch you oscillate back and forth with the illusions you manage to deceive yourself with, one day claiming victory, the next day doom. Every dying addict goes through this hell as he tells himself he can live with his disease even as evidence to the contrary mounts daily. We kill for our creed, simple as that, preventing needed work from being done, emptying needed houses and blaming it all on God. It's funny in its absurdity, I'll grant you that. But try and take my life, motherfuckers, and I will burn you where you stand.

After all, I'm only giving you what you ask for - Nature always gives us what we ask in the end. (Of course, it's impossible to ask for life if you hate the way you live.)

The stone the builders reject
becomes the cornerstone;
Bet your life on it