Finneran: War Without End

Friday, November 16, 2018

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

The country is insane.

Non-stop commentary fuels non-stop “outrage”. It’s America’s newest industry. Apparently, the rage machine must be fed on a regular basis in order to drive ratings.

Breathless broadcasters scream their scripts. Everything is labeled “breaking news”. College students, the most over-wrought, over-indulged, pampered, privileged nincompoops you could ever imagine, are offended, at all times, by all things.

We are told that they are “woke”. I disagree. They are morons. As are their woke professors, their woke administrators, and their broke parents.

I pity the parents. They assume that old alma mater is still teaching math, history, science, and literature. Old alma mater is not. Rather, the curriculum is now composed of “studies”, all of which inculcate victimhood and “outrage”.

Alma mater also marches to the drumbeat of “diversity”, which might actually have some meaning if it included viewpoint diversity. It does not. Rather, America’s campuses are a gulag of braying “victims” waiting to pounce upon the poor student or professor who expresses any doubt about the “normative” nonsense of the faculty lounge. One might as well grab some popcorn and watch the show trials---favorite practices and pastimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro---and the requisite groveling apology one must make for being insensitive or unwoke to constantly changing “truths”.

Consider “micro-aggressions”, “safe spaces”, and “cultural appropriation”, all latched on to by crybabies desperate for “validation”. What hogwash. It’s nonsense on steroids. Might someone in authority confront the crybabies with a stopwatch and a statement that their expulsions will take effect in ten minutes, with no refunds of tuition? I’d wager that the college Quad would be clear in five minutes or less.

Meanwhile, a deadly and heart-breaking scene unfolds as we enter the seventeenth year of a war without strategy, a war without end. Here lies a cause in need of serious and sustained protest rather than the continuation of fake street theater over non-existent aggressions.

A recent tragedy sets the scene:

Brent Taylor, age 39, married and the father of seven children is sent to Afghanistan for his fourth deployment overseas. He is killed—murdered—in an “insider attack”. The fact that he was the Mayor of North Ogden, Utah is only relevant in that his public service generated the headline which caught America’s eye. But America’s attention span fades quickly. After all, Ellen and Oprah, Kimmel and Colbert, the NFL and SNL all have a higher claim on our thoughts than Brent Taylor, American soldier.

Our leaders don’t lead. Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump have chosen to fight a fake war, so as not to rattle the American people. But the war was not fake to Brent Taylor. It was very real and quite deadly.

His children, ages 13 to eleven months will hear that their Dad was a hero. But they don’t want a hero. They want their Dad.

And their Dad deserved better. Better leadership from better Presidents. The war has been going on for seventeen years! We are fighting on a credit card and we are fighting with forces strung out from three, four, and five deployments. As a nation, we once knew how to fight. War bonds, taxes, rationing, and all healthy citizens subject to a military draft. But that America is gone, now derided by the woke students and professors who are always the smartest people in the room. Just ask them..............

And our leaders dissemble so as not to interrupt our trip to the mall.

Seventeen years and counting.

The nation is insane.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.