Ashes

In case you ain't heard, there's a bit of a dry spell here in Texas. Brush fire's kind of a son of a bitch. Gets so dry and hot the grass catches fire like you'd have poured gasoline all over the landscape. People are losin' homes all over the place. Animals out there dyin' and losin' their territory. Not so much of that to go around as it is. Firefighters have been bustin' their asses to get the situation under control. They will, eventually. That's just the first step though. People still gotta get up and dust the ashes off their lives. Same with any tragedy.

I'm obviously a fan of westerns. Lotta great one's out there: The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven, 3:10 to Yuma, The Magnificent Seven, and Lonesome Dove, just to name a few. Western movies often feature characters that are looking for revenge or justice. A cowboy has a wrong done to him or hears of a wrong bein' done to some defenseless and innocent types so he sends bloody hell flyin' from his pistols to set things right. People like westerns 'cause they were all about this lawless frontier where a man could take the law into his own hands and do what a man's gotta do. Modern life ain't so simple. Even less simple if what did a body wrong was nature. No getting' revenge for brush fire. All you can do is salvage what you can and help each other out. Show a lil sympathy for those that lost anything in the fires. That situation is a might harsh, particularly when our economy is on its knees as it is. People that didn't have much are losin' what lil they had. You know they want a way to make it right. They have a right to be angry and sad and hurt. If you happen to be a lucky one like myself and all you've seen of this destruction is smoke, you ought to be sympathetic to your fellow man and help him as best you can. Find out where you can donate food, clothes, or money. Give a hug if that's all you can afford.

Comin' up real soon is the anniversary of another big loss, one the U.S. went full Eastwood on to get revenge. A few extremists with a plan that worked ran planes into the twin towers, the pentagon, and the last one went down before it could hit its intended target. Nearly 3,000 people died that day. Countless other lives were ruined. Even more injured or dyin' as a result of those attacks. A decade of war and lookin' for that revenge. Blood for blood. Spendin' a lot of cash and usin' up a helluva lot of resources to find one man and any man that might've helped him commit such an atrocity.

There's no doubt that what was done was unthinkable. It changed the average American's way of life at least for the last decade. It's split our nation into those that want revenge and those that think the revenge was an excuse for oil execs to go play cowboys and indians with the winner gettin' an ocean of oil. We've sent our boys to go over and die. They did right by us. They got Bin Laden. They got Saddam. They're gettin' as many of the bastards as they can. But it'll never stop. We fight a war on terror. We fight fear. There's no winnin' that. Fear is an idea. It's a method used when a group can't fight fair against our armies and tanks. They oppose America because they are afraid of what it has done in the past and what it could do in the future. We oppose them because after ten years, we're still just as afraid of them as we were that dark September mornin'. It's essentially the same fear they have.

Maybe the spread of Democracy in the region could save a lot of lives there, maybe we could make the quality of life better for those people, but we'll kill ourselves doin' it. We're already broke. We've already lost a lot more lives than we did on that one day. But our revenge has already been taken. Now we've gone into the homes of our villains, took what we liked, and told their wives and children, “We're the good guys, we're A number 1, and you should do as we say or we'll do to you what we did to them.” With that philosophy is there a wonder why we're still goin' on this revenge trail alone? Our allies ducked out of this years ago. They could see where we were goin'.

Losin' ain't the kinda thing that comes a lotta folks. You lose your home, you get angry, you cry, you rebuild with help from your friends and family. You lose your friends or family, you get angry, you cry, you move on with help from the friends and family you have left. Western movies and the idea that revenge has to be taken seem nice because it's what everyone wants. You want to pick up that gun and kill somebody back. You want them to pay for what they've done. You wanna kill him, his wife, his dog, and burn his house down. Ask any soldier that has taken a life, it's not the kind of thing everybody can do or should do. Ten years later and we're still doin' the same ol' things, you wanna be fightin' the same war in ten more years?