My take on absurdities and atrocities

This is my take after reading the article I linked to the other day. Yes, the one I asked yo to read that dealt with absurdities and atrocities.

This was my reply to the author of the article. 

We, all of us living today, are bound up with these absurdities and the attendant atrocities.  Yes, those who can make you believe absurdities WILL make you commit atrocities. Holy crap, the Marines dod that to me and my fellow Marines in Vietnam.
Now they did tell us before we Left to go there to be prepared for a culture shock. The Vietnamese didn't have indoor plumbing, well mot out of the big cities, which I never got to. They didn't have what the Brits used to (may still do) call "mod cons".  That is modern conveniences, like electricity at the flip of a switch and other things we who were being sent there had grown up with. Actually, for me there was no great culture shock when I got to Vietnam.  No, for my buddy Chief, he really was a Native American (related to Ira Hayes in fact) and myself, the big culture shock was coming back to 'Merikkka. We landed at Travis AFB near San Francisco.  After we cleared customs and were looking for the bus to get to the airport, we saw "regular" people in civilian clothes and I still remember Chief yelling "Holy shit charlie! Round eyed women!".  Of course we got all sorts of nasty looks from nearly everybody in the building.
We had been force fed absurdities and yes, we had committed atrocities. We had been to war as active participants. I promised myself before I'd been in country less than five months that I'd never use physical violence unless it was to protect those I loved from great harm or death. My violence has been verbal ever since I got back to the US of A in September of 1971.
I don't take and will not accept any pride in that fact. I just made a promise to myself that I have kept, though at times I have been sorely tempted  to break it. We have been fed absurdities what passes for elections since we were kids. Many of us have gone on to commit atrocities, gone off to some damn fool war. I really wish we could stop buying all this crap and just TRY, honestly try, to treat all the people we meet each day the way we want to be treated. So simple, so easy, and yet it seems damn near impossible to get others to even try. If I wasn't so close to my own end, I'd be quite sad by this seemingly impossible task. And yet, it IS so bloody damn easy. Why so few even try….that is the big mystery I'd like to solve.

Since you had to slog through this post, I feel I should try and lighten things up a bit. So, here are a few extra LOL cats, just because.

OK, until next time, just TRY to treat others the way you want to be treated. Yeah, yeah, I know I said I wasn't going to ask you to do that any more. Well, I'm not asking you to do it any more, but I am also not asking you to do it any less either. Come ON people, just TRY to do it. You may make some other person feel better and you may feel better for having done it. Unless or until you try, you'll never know.