A SEASONAL PONDERING
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER
Whenever that feeling of having the devil at my heels goes away I stop and try to remember where I was running in the first place. One question comes to mind every time, "What is it that people do?" None of that really seems clear anymore. I grew up expecting that I would get smarter and life would somehow plan itself out in an orderly way. Now I know it was only a movie. I grew up believing I was a fictional character and, instead, ended up in real life. Real life can suck.
When things seem overwhelming, I only have to look around me, at my friends. Few live without fears for their children, their jobs, elderly parents or even holding it together in a world that, we are too often told, no longer needs people like "us." Christmas is a time when we remember. The two periods that haunt my holidays are my own childhood, growing up in Detroit in the 1950s and watching my own small children wait for Christmas day decades later, somehow believing that buying the right gifts or having the required "atmosphere" would make me a perfect parent. The longer I live the less I know, or the more I know of how little I ever knew.
As I drove from parking lot to parking lot in an endless attempt to garner sufficient items to put together a few holiday meals I was hit with a flood of memories. I remembered our tiny house on Bryden Street in Detroit in a neighborhood covered with soot. I remember opening toy cars, made in America of steel and rubber tires, the factories that made those toys as long gone as the cars they depicted, most not even in museums anymore. Who ever heard of a Henry J?
There were two Christmases in Vietnam, both in the bush, no turkey dinner, no "Bob Hope" but with my family all the same. A couple of us will talk after they read this. If someone had flown a turkey dinner in for us like they always do in the movie versions of Vietnam, I would have missed 40 years of pissing and moaning about military hypocracy. That would have been a disaster as going after the military or our Veterans services is good sport, like shooting fish in a barrel. The generation before beat Hitler and all we have to fight is a few million thieves and bureaucrats. But this isn’t a life, not the kind we were promised when we were kids.
We were all going to go away, fight a war, return home to jobs in a country that built cars, cars that would fly, space stations on the moon, tourists going to Mars, back in a country where some things would look so different but other things all stay that same, those important things, things we call "lasting." We were going to keep our friends from high school and college, our "army buddies" and watch our kids grow up in a world made better by our sacrifice.
I keep doing it, again and again. Real life and movies mixed up together. In movies, not the ones we watch on holidays, our kids don’t get sick and die or move away. Our parents don’t waste away with lingering diseases or our family members spend years away from home in endless wars. We don’t wake up every day knowing our company is going under or worrying about how we will pay the gas bill. If these things are in movies, everything is fixed in the end. George Bailey gets a second chance. Tiny Tim throws away his crutches. In "Love Actually" the PM marries the fat girl and they live happily every after. In real life, she would be hit by a bus.
I am assuming that most of you are in houses decorated for the holidays with food stuffing the refrigerator and presents in the closets waiting to come out. This is what things are like here. Some will make it for Christmas, some, perhaps too many, won’t. Life has no guarantees and really isn’t a movie. Still we hope. In politics, we hope the new idiots will be less painful than the old ones, some hope, some pray and some throw their hands in the air and scream. Pity the ones who do nothing.
Here, we only got back on the 22nd after spending a few weeks in Europe visiting friends and family. It is something I do now to get thru the holidays. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. The economic crisis we have here it hitting there even harder. Their prices were always high, gas there is still high and they can’t give it away here. The streets are full of shoppers and the Christmas Markets that Germany is so famous for are filled to capacity but much less shopping is going on. Is that bad?
I spent time with our military in Ramstein, Spangdahlem and Garmisch. However, its the kids we have in Iraq, Afghanistan and a dozen other countries that need to be in our wishes this holiday season. So many places our military is stationed around the world, some areas with families, some without, life goes on, sometimes under quite luxurious circumstances, sometimes more humble but with a certain inevitability that war is meant to be a way of life rather than an international disaster.
President Obama is going to be faced with a war in Afghanistan, the "real war" that was put on hold by the fiasco in Iraq, a phony but deadly war fought for the benefit of oil companies and defense contractors. Our new and continuing war in Afghanistan will be a war against an enemy stronger and more entrenched than ever before. Here at Christmas we can think of each of the kids and the "not so young" kids far away and hope they are safe and well. More importantly, we can build an America they can return home to with jobs and homes, a country that isn’t torn apart with rich against poor and black against brown against white against Asian. There may be some hope for us. We will see.
One thing travel does is help you appreciate America. Even with our holiday lines and the bitter cold here in Ohio, you can still get from place to place, buy food if you can afford it and do a thousand things with a grace and style that are purely American, something only travel to distant lands can bring into focus.
For years it has been "support the troops" and wave the flag. This Christmas we may all be "the troops" or at least feel that way. We all face uncertainty, stress and doubt. Millions of Americans lack the basic needs of life that most, not all but most, of our troops have, that being food, clothing, shelter and health care. For 8 years we supported the troops with lip service, incompetent leadership, bad medical care and a Veterans Affairs department prepared to pounce on them with bureaucratic ferocity. It wasn’t just the troops America turned a blind eye to. 5% of Americans have recently lost their homes and this is only the beginning. Where are those people this Christmas? 553,000 Americans lost their jobs in November. How is Christmas for them?
Too many Americans loved talking about the troops but enjoyed knowing that it was "them" fighting the war and not "us." Maybe we are ready to wake up and realize that "we" is not just our troops or even all Americans but something much more. Whatever mess we are in, we are in with billions of people, not hundreds of millions. These are people like us, amazingly so, be they Kurds or Afghan or Ugandan or Somali. Every second we live without knowing this endangers us in ways I can’t begin to explain.
Waking up one morning and finding that half the world’s money disappeared, as expected, the "half" that feeds the poor and middle class only, of course, has changed everything. Greed, religion, war and hatred may no longer be enough to keep the world turning quite the way it had. My guess is that change might not be as bad a thing as staying the same.
Expect change. Bank on it if you still can. Maybe we can start thinking about science and solving problems and less about pointing fingers and torturing people. The "Dark Ages" was known for its hatred of thought, of science, of rationality. Fear and superstition laid waste to western civilization for centuries. Maybe this is the last Christmas, the last of 8 years that seem to many of us to weigh like centuries, the 
end of a "mini-Dark Age" of fear and ignorance.
Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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