My thoughts on Memorial Day:

So today, my email box and social media feeds are awash with messages like these:

Off to sleep - but remembering my family members and great friends who have served all of us and are still serving all of us - so we can enjoy our freedom and lay our heads down in our cozy little homes without worry of losing our life. Thank you!

So thankful to everyone who has risked or given their lives for my freedom. God bless the USA ♥

We're VERY thankful for all the veterans and current enlisted men and women in our armed services. Thank you for protecting our country (and the world!), and putting your life on the line and making our freedom possible!

WTF? You brainwashed people! What happens when you don't pay your overly inflated property value taxes? Income taxes? Vehicle taxes? Road use taxes? Retail taxes?

What will your city or county do if you can't afford their municipal water and sewer rates? Electric rates? Is it illegal for your water and electricity to be cut off?

How does your homeowner's association react to your garden? Your clothes line? Your old car parked in your driveway? Your flag pole?

How "free" are you under the current fascist system in the US?

In 1961, President Eisenhower warned the people of the United States about the business and profit-taking of going to war...

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

I am a combat veteran. I fought as an Abrams tank driver during Desert Storm in 1991. The blind patriotism, unwarranted hero worship, and unquestioning admiration of the economics of warfare as "the gaining of freedom" has turned this into a day of self loathing for me.

Not one American soldier has died in the name of freedom for Americans since September, 1945.

And so I remember the revolutionary Patriots, the Continental Army under the command of Geo. Washington. I remember the doughboys of WWI and the leg infantry on Normandy. I tip my boonie cap to you all... a dying generation.

To the remainder of us physically and mentally scarred war veterans (Korea, Vietnam, Beirut, Grenada, Panama, Iraq & Kuwait), mindless pawns for the gears of war and fodder for the cannons of profit, you have my deepest sympathies.