"I'm 70 and I'm Tired"

"I'm 70 and I'm Tired"
By Robert A. Hall




I'm 70. Except for having 4 children with only a 6 week maternity period, I've worked, hard, since I was 17.

Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and seldom called in sick in seven or eight years.

I made a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am.

Given the economy, retirement is hard, and I'm tired. Very tired.


I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.


I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories:

of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honour";
of Muslims rioting over some slight offense;
of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers";
of Muslims burning schools for girls;
of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery";
of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls;

all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an and Shari'a law tells them to.


I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and mandrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America and Canada, while no American, Canadian or Australia group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.



I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate.




I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off?


I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught.

I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.


I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big-whatever for their problems.


Yes, I'm damn tired. But I'm also glad to be 70, because, mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my grandchildren.


Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.




There is no way this will be widely publicised, unless each of us sends it on!
This is your chance to make a difference.


" I'm 70 and I'm tired.”

Posted by Alan

The Arrogance of Losers

The Arrogance of Losers

How many times do we bankrupt ourselves for a WWII defense only to lose to Third World nations? Our military has floundered in three Asian land wars without a clear vision of the mission.

Our leaders are hard put to find the enemy on a road map. They showered Vietnam with Agent Orange that returned home with our troops. We gave toxic agents to Saddam only to have the prevailing winds blow them back to our bases. We handed out 500,000 small arms to Iraqis without any record.

We put Osama on the map as an Afghan resistance leader fighting the Russians.

To finance our wars, we borrowed from the Chinese. Now, they can buy a number of US States, proclaim them as colonies to employ slave labor and sell trinkets to the white people.

In the coming election the Republicans could lose every office up for grabs.

Street corner bums could do better.

War Lessons Never Learned

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus.

[Excerpts]

For starters, people don’t like losing control of their country. With the exceptions of the Kurds and Maliki and his allies, Iraqis are overwhelmingly opposed to the occupation. That disconnect between occupied and occupiers was summed up by Luu Doan Huynh, a Vietnamese veteran of the war against the Japanese, the French, and the Americans, and one of the key diplomats in the Vietnam peace talks. “The Americans thought that Vietnam was a war,” he said. “We knew that Vietnam was our country.”

As the Bush administration saw it, a successful attack on the Mahdi army would not only clear the way for privatizing the Iraqi oil industry, it would demonstrate that the Iraqi army was ready “to stand up,” thus boosting the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

But as Karl von Clausewitz once pointed out, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Historical analogies are tricky. They may obscure as much as they reveal. But history is the only guide we have, and it is one the Bush administration has willfully chosen to ignore.

As it did in Vietnam, the United States looks at Iraq though the lens of firepower and troop deployments. But war is not just about things that blow up, and occupiers always ignore the point of view of the occupied.

As Frank Rich pointed out in The New York Times, there was indeed a whiff of Tet in the debacle in Basra. Just before the 1968 attack, U.S. General William Westmoreland made his historic “light at the end of the tunnel” prediction. In recent testimony before the Senate, General David Petraeus said the United States was making “significant” progress in Iraq, and his spokesman, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, bragged that the United States had the Mahdi army on the ropes: “We’ve degraded their capability.”

“There is a parallel to Tet here,” says military historian Jack Radey. “’We have won the war, violence is down, the surge works’ [the U.S. told itself], and then Kaboom! The Green Zone is taking incoming.”

Radey argues that the American “victories” against the Vietnamese in the period leading up to the Tet offensive were an illusion. “If the enemy seems to be missing from the picture, this is not proof you have wiped him out,” he says. “It is more likely proof that you have lost track of him, and he will, at his own chosen time, find ways to remind you of his presence.”

NATO Wins Battles but Loses Afghan War

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. John Thomas looks through a target shot by Afghan National Army trainers on a firing range Kandahar on Jan. 23, 2008.

'Boots' McCain says we are doing fine in Iraq. He was a brave flyer, but he takes the lead from strategy know nothings. The President sees the recent upswing in fighting as a positive development.

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (IPS) - "Make no mistake," begins a new issue brief from non-partisan think tank the Atlantic Council of the United States, "NATO is not winning in Afghanistan."

That brief, called "Saving Afghanistan: An Appeal and Plan for Urgent Action", was released Wednesday at an event on Capitol Hill, along with two other reports that call on the international community and the U.S. to "re-energise their faltering effort" in Afghanistan.

The speakers at the release of the reports all showed equal concern that, despite overwhelming U.S. and international military might, things are going badly awry in Afghanistan and that a comprehensive reworking of international strategy there was needed.

"The fatal consequence, all too familiar to those of who lived through Vietnam, is that you can win every battle, but fail to win the war," said Sen. John Kerry in his introductory remarks. "Absent a new focus and a transformed strategy, many of us fear that may be happening again."
[IPS]