Don’t Walk Into The Meat Grinder

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento District, Public domain

You can feel the rumble deep in the earth, hear the cracking of stone beneath tremendous weight. The machine is waking, stretching away the rust and corrosion in its ancient joints.

It is beginning to call, issue a mournful wail. Your children are wanted, it is demanding its fill.

And when it comes knocking, crashing through doors, then you will know, the Empire is home.

In college, I read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It is haunting recollection of war through the eyes of the common soldier, a view of atrocity with a perspective aimed at the possessions which accompanied them along the way.

At first, things were slow, the troubles far away. But one day they were closer, no longer in a mythical place called MENA but in our imperial backyard.

“Oh, but it isn’t so bad,” you say, “for our own protection after all.” But from whom? And why?

The machine groans and utters a bugling blast, RALLY TO ME!

And the young ones go, the subtle calls on the wind now with a definite origin. The young ones go.

“They must go!” I hear, “Its for our own good!” they say. And so, the young ones go.

What will our young ones take, when beckoned off to war? What will it be they clutch to their chests in the dark? Are iPhones allowed in Hell?

“No, it isn’t enough. These must go, too!”

The immigrants are going, rounded up and sent to camp. Maybe they get the option, join the churn or face the burn.

“The jobs, who will do the jobs?”

The young ones are coming home! Draped in stars and stripes, crosses and guns. They’re still out there really, can never come home.

The machine howls, guttural and obscene. The ground quakes and rises, lurching to meet the heavens.

It needs more. It must have more.

Precious boundaries and borders crumble as it turns away, the power once held tight evaporating as mist the moment the steel gaze leaves their lands.

The Empire is small, the Wizard of Oz.

The war has come home, the Colossus searches and hunts. You know what it is, now that it’s far too late.

“Do you have more young for the Great War? How old is that one, he looks about old enough.”

“I’m sorry, Baby. Daddy has to leave.”

Jimmy goes to school and never comes home, Jenny sends her parents to camp.

Will you go too? Take what you can carry?

We will all go; the only question is where. Some will have a choice, some will have a chance. For most, it may as well be destiny.

Some will be taken from the street as simply as a bit of paper in the wind, disappearing into the void in a mere moment. Some will get nice letters with dates and signatures and stamps, leaving behind a drawn out goodbye before the death sentence.

The machine staggers, thorn in foot and fury writ large.

The young ones are home!

They come from the floorboards, crawlspaces, and attics. Sneak back through the border or across the sparse countryside.

Draped in black and carrying swords, they wield fire and bombs and trucks and buses; the fury of Empire turned inward, the self-disembowelment of a figmented reality.

“The young ones are home!” They have a reckoning in their eyes.