War. War Never Changes

 

I'm posting after midnight, but basically throughout the day "today," Saturday the 24th that is, everywhere you looked online there was mention from one perspective or another, of the second fatal shooting in just a few weeks, of a person who stood up to ICE agents in Minneapolis. 

Again, there are polar-opposite opinions which pit Americans against one-another in what seems like a weird psychological experiment where two people can see the same incident and each come to completely opposite conclusions. 

I don't go too heavy into the political fray here. Yes I lean left and I certainly have my opinions of things but I also see a lot of potential risk in voicing those opinions too vehemently at this juncture. All I'm saying is I can certainly imagine things getting a whole lot worse. I mean, really, a fuck ton lot worse. 

Which brings me to two things.

The above picture is taken from a post, well, posted on the Fallout subreddit a few hours ago. The OP simply stated they just started playing Fallout 1 and they surely like it. Of course, most of us "got it." The real intent was to sneak a politically charged statement into a subreddit where it had "no place" and would otherwise have been banned by a mod. But, they sneak it by the human and bot mods by posting a snapshot of one of the iconic images taken from the opening cinematics of that game, you know, right before Ron Pearlman says those infamous spoken words: "War. War never changes."

Of course, the history buff in me knows that the game designers probably had the following famous LIFE Magazine photo in mind when envisioning the above street execution in the name of "peace." It's from the Vietnam War and shows the street execution of a suspected Viet Cong.


The second thing that is just a weird coincidence is that this evening, before I read any of my news feeds and learned of today's (remember, I'm still thinking today is Saturday the 24th) shooting in Minneapolis, I watched One Battle After Another on my newly-resubscribed HBO Max.

Man, those scenes of military-controlled "Police" in camo armor assaulting US cities to round-up "illegals" and shit, as well as just executing "undesirables" as they hunted them down, seemed pulled right from the headlines. Turns out this movie was in the can by mid 2024, well before the current "milieu." Good bit of prediction there PTA.


So where do we go from here? Do we, like me, all just sit back in our electric recliners, munching our metaphorical popcorn as we watch it all unfold on a screen? Do we look back just half a century earlier to a time when for some, justice was at the hands of a "judge and executioner" dressed in dirty fatigues, meted out with a shiny Colt .45 and expect that to be the norm? Or do we acknowledge, as gravely Ron almost whispers to us in Fallout, that war never changes? So what should we do about that?