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Celebrate the 4th
<Watch this>
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/america-great.html
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Captivating to see how the US shifts over time.
What is really fascinating is to be in Laos, a communist country.
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Here, there are no McDonald’s, no KFC, no Starbucks, no 7-11’s, no ExxonMobile
– no corporate takeover.
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However, the past played large here.
Western corporate interests did not want to see these colonized countries fall away from decades of foreign influence.
Merchants of War fought pitilessly to keep their power.
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From 1964 to 1973, as part of the Secret War operation conducted during the Vietnam War, the US military dropped 270 million cluster bombs – about 2.5 million tons of munitions – on Laos over the course of 580,000 bombing missions.
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I was here.
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I was in Thailand as a missionary when this was happening. [1970-71] We were invited by fellow Mormon members serving in the US Air Force to come by and check out the cool shit they were doing – the Boeing B-52’s, the millions of bombs.
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I had completely forgotten about this until last winter when my mom told me that I should check out all my old slides in the attic. These pictures are all forgotten slides I had taken at a Thai/USAF base in Thailand at the age of 20.
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A past epic and now dreadful remembrance.
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> W e c a n l o v e o u r c o u n t r y <
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But we must never forget – all countries and borders are the invented stories of men.
They are fiction and have nothing to do with objective reality.
[For the most part, women get a pass on this kind of shit.]
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God didn’t ask us to drop millions of bombs on human beings.
Elected politicians backed by corporate lobbying did.
Our taxes paid for them.
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Every year these cluster bombs are still killing hundreds of people in Laos
– 60% of them are children –
every year since the 1970’s.
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I’m in Laos.
It’s the 4th of July.
I’m thinking a lot about what we do in the world.
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