I'm Tired, But I'm Not Giving Up

I have to write this out, as a form of therapy because writing it all down makes it a little more real and helps get it out of my head.

I’ve been through more this year than I care to admit, mentally and physically.

The year started off with my son going through a surgery that we were afraid he wouldn’t walk out of. He was only 14 years old and had a life ahead of him, and the thought of that life being ripped away because of an infection tore me apart.

Thankfully, he made it through and wound up bouncing back, playing football this fall for the first time ever and even getting onto the field one chilly and exciting Friday night.

My oldest daughter graduated from high school and went off to basic training, which is a huge change in both her world and that of her mother and I’s. Not only is she no longer there to just hang out with and talk to on a regular basis, but she’s also in the military at a time where the world is on edge and the “leadership” is scary.

I also had a health scare that isn’t even fully resolved as we close in on the end of the year. An ultrasound revealed a growth on my Thyroid that may or may not be cancer. The biopsy they did was inconclusive at first, though further testing said it’s probably benign. As re-assuring as that seems, it doesn’t fully alleviate the stress that comes with a potential future diagnosis.

And that potential cancer stems from my time spent in Iraq in 2011, bringing my mind to what happened while I was there.

I had to tend to burn pits, which may have led to any number of possible diseases I could be faced with in the future, but that wasn’t even the worst part.

I had friends, brothers, who I watched being carried down a ramp, their bodies draped in flags and loaded onto a helicopter.

And many of their deaths were the result of IED’s, where they were blown apart in a second of bright light and horror. Those events were bad enough for the fact that they killed people I fought alongside, but were even worse when I had to then climb into my own vehicle, tourniquets tied around each leg, ready to be tightened as I sat in the gunner’s hatch and hoped my legs weren’t the next to be blown off.

And that leads right into the next thing that’s been hitting me hard this year, watching the country that I and so many others sacrificed for falling apart.

The division that’s been present for decades has grown worse than it’s been in generations. People have lost their humanity, and many don’t have a moral compass that works. We’ve seen people being snatched up in the streets by masked men who love doing as much harm as they can manage, while others lose their jobs and struggle to even put food on their table.

The people in charge of things are actively tearing up and ignoring the constitution so many of us took an oath to defend, and the person at the top of the pile of shit is building a gilded ballroom as he and his party take away food and medical care from those who need it the most.

It’s these things that make me sick to my stomach as I worry about the direction we’re heading.

Do we really intend to wipe out our friends, neighbors and family members because we think that will somehow lead to a better future? Is starving people when we have the means to feed them the right thing to do? Should someone who’s worked hard for years really be plucked from their place of work and shipped off to a country they don’t even know?

There’s a whole group of people in this country that would have those things and more take place because they don’t have any moral backbone. They stand on the bodies of the dead and proudly proclaim they would do it all again because they see it as some kind of justice. They think that actively causing harm, holding down those who need a hand up, is the right way.

Of course, that’s always true until you’re the one who needs the hand up.

Things aren’t going back to the way they were even a decade ago. We’ll never again have the world many of us knew and grew up in, but we do have a choice to make as we move forward.

We can choose to build a world where we make sure everyone is taken care of. We can choose to stand up to the tyranny that stands at our doorstep and beat it down. We can choose to respond to hate and bigotry with compassion and care. We can choose to be better than those who led us to this moment.

We need to rise up and take on the challenges we face despite the hurdles we’ve had to overcome to get here. With everything I’ve been through this year, and for the past couple of decades in my life, it would be easy to just give up, to just lie down and accept what the world has become as people suffer and die all around, but I can’t do that.

I can’t just sit idly by and watch as hate and anger destroy everything I stand for.

While I might not be able to stand on the front lines of this fight, I will continue to stand up in my own way and fight in the best way I can. This is a war of ideas and winning it won’t be easy. So many have gotten lost and turned around in the age of click-bait and algorithms and it’s going to take every possible angle and ability to turn the tide.

We have to make an effort in our own lives to seek out information and learn how to digest it properly, we have to learn how to empathize with and understand other people and stop hate and bigotry in their tracks.

Things aren’t going to be easy, they’ve never been and never will be, and in the end it might all have been for naught, but I’m choosing to stand up and try to make a change because I refuse to let this world break me. What about you?