Ambush in Nice

"After the slaughter in Nice, are we safe anywhere?"

The headline, as intended, caught my attention.  My immediate answer "No we aren't safe anywhere."  As long as people are sufficiently warped to want to kill other people and the means are available, sooner or later the killers succeed.

That fatalism comes to me from jungle patrol in Vietnam.  We knew there were people out there who wanted to kill us and we more or less expected it even as we hoped to just luck out.  The world seems to feel the same these days.  Whenever I hear of a mass murder I always think of the victims being ambushed in the course of what used to be normal life. 

In infantry school we were taught how to respond to an ambush.  The first lesson was that if you know that you are being ambushed, the enemy has missed its best chance to kill you.  If you were in the killing zone, you would already be dead.  Second, the last thing the ambusher expects is for the his targets to attack.  He wants you pinned down so he can get another chance to kill more of you.  Charging the ambushers is your best bet for staying alive.  End of lesson.

A simple lesson. 

If it were only that simple.

Will Capitalism Pervert Everything?

The Washington Post has a good article on profit-making in the hospice industry.  Apparently profits are good, largely at the expense of the public. 

My only experience with hospice was during my friend Mel's last days last June.  I was most impressed with the care provided for Mel and assistance to his family.  All in all, very good.  The hospice worker(s?) was a volunteer but was part of an organization (a friend also volunteered there) that scheduled visits, provided medical equipment and probably other services.   If I thought about the larger organization, I assumed it was non-profit.  This morning, following the link from the provider located at the address where I returned a stray part from the oxygen system, I found the home page of the LHC Group.  It does not look particularly non-profit. 

Profit status notwithstanding, the hospice care I witnessed during Mel's passing was everything I could wish for myself or anyone.  I wasn't in on all the details of the family's experience with the hospice but I have no complaint about anything I saw.  I also recognize that those services come at a cost.  Money will be involved. 

So it should not come as a surprise to learn that hospice care is big business.  More surprising, though,  to find that Mel is among the least welcome patients.  He died within a week; short durations are not at all profitable.  Reading the Post article, I find that idea of hospice care has  been turned on its head to create profits for investors at public expense.  The "recruiting" practices of the various companies bothered me.  I would think that the need for hospice care would be initiated by the individual or family, not in response to a sales pitch.  But that's all part of the for-profit business plan:  expand, grow and produce profits.

Maybe this system works--Mel was well-cared for--but I'm skeptical.  Our profit-driven health care system produces poor results at high cost so extending that model further is not wise.  In the short term, think of the additional care that could be purchased with what Medicare now pays for corporate profit.



    

Local Hero

From Rachel's emails:

7 February 2003:

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me - Ali - or point at the posters of him on the walls.

[...]

[N]o amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it - and even then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and the fact, of course, that I have the option of leaving. Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown. I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean. When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting halfway between Mud Bay and downtown Olympia at a checkpoint with the power to decide whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home again when I'm done.

The details.

A Wounded Army. A Wounded Nation.

Listening to NPR yesterday afternoon while running errands I heard part of a story about a soldier. I missed the lead-in but I did hear the soldier say something like "to pull out, to ask these guys to quit after all they've done. It would destroy the Army just like it did after Vietnam." That thought has stayed with me since. The soldier is right, of course. To simply say "oops, we don't need what you've died for", is a crushing blow. But when the alternative is to destroy the country with endless war that does absolutely nothing to keep this nation safe, then I must choose my my country. If our Army is truly strong, it will survive. It came back after Vietnam.

But the crime is done. The Army has been butt-fucked. Men and women were and are sent to kill and be killed in a war on false premises. Profits for contractors, access and opportunity for Big Oil. A geo-strategic mission for economic gain and political hegemony. Rather than defend America against terrorists, US forces have ended up mostly defending themselves against local insurgents and killing enough civilians in the process to create greater anger at the "foreign infidels." Sacrifice aplenty but to no useful end. What might in 2002-03 have led to some resolution in Afghanistan was sidetracked to Iraq. Afghanistan became a forgotten war while Cheney and Bush played out their military fantasies,grinding down service men and women with repeated deployments .

Now it's 2010 and America is still in Afghanistan, that war no longer forgotten. We begin our 9th year in October, bogged down beyond belief, in a region more unstable and violent as the consequence of our presence. After years of inattention that allowed Afghanistan to further descend into factional violence, the US would do well to end the occupation and the Army would do well to follow that order,however difficult. Absent our forces, little that occurs in Afghanistan would affect this nation. The few threats from Afghanistan that could possibly affect America can be dealt with far more effectively than with ground forces.

No matter how ending the war might affect the military, ending the war is the only sustainable, long-term policy. The sooner we learn that, the better this nation and the world will be. It's a hard lesson, though. The Soviets took nine years to learn. It looks like the US will take longer. In the meantime, more and more Americans and Afghanis will be among those who died for a mistake.

Like I said. The crime is done. Blood flows.