The Meat Grinder

Noon. Sunday. I turn on the TV to all of our trusted news sources. As usual, I see the smiling portraits of this week's version of who got blown away in the name of "freedom", and each and every time, the faces I see have one glaring similarity:

They are faces of children.

Many of these kids were barely out of high school. Many were killed while their pals back home were whooping it up at a university kegger. When you received your degree, someone your age died somewhere in battle.

Did any of your friends start any of these wars?

Are their lives worth these wars they didn't start?

Where are the decision-makers in the grand scheme of things? They look awfully comfortable to me in their cozy office and boardrooms and press podiums, delivering the same rhetoric to us over and over and over again. Why aren't your lives sacrificed for these causes? Why is it always the children who maim and kill and perish?

To other human beings, these dead children are your son and your daughter and your brother and your sister and your friend and your lover. How do so few see the connection? Please tell me more than two percent of our population are capable of thinking like this. Please tell me our sitcoms and sporting events and "reality" television are not more immportant than the deaths of your loved ones, because as long as they're someone's loved ones, they're yours as well.

Fucking for procreation: the modern-day meat grinder. We'll only let you fornicate when we deem it to be necessary.