Women
Without Men: Problems In Iraq And In Berkeley
14 January 2010By Jane Stillwater
Recently an African-American friend of mine asked me a
rather strange question. "Do you know what really
annoys me?" he asked. I don't know, what? That Obama
sold out healthcare? The high price of gold? My
current bad hair day? Sarah Palin pretending to be a
populist? What? "It's the way that some
African-American women just look at me like I was a
piece of fresh meat." Oh dear. Do we really want to go
there?
"Sometimes you can just see their minds working. 'If I
can just convince him that I'm sexy, then he'll want
me for my body and if he wants me badly enough, then
he'll marry me and then we can have chiilren.' I call
it 'Motherhood Fever'. And it just drives me nuts."
I can get behind that. Babies are totally cute -- and
for a very good reason. They are purposely made that
way in order to preserve the species. If a baby is
cute enough, then you will be more likely to put up
with all that diaper-changing and incessant crying and
having to walk the floor with them at night.
In fact, I'm even about to bounce up to the local
maternity hospital and ask them if I can volunteer in
the baby nursery there. Why not? I'm a world
record-holder for getting a collicky baby to smile --
two minutes or less! You got a collicky one-month-old?
Call me! I'm there! But I digress.
"These time-ticking lady baby machines don't even see
me as a person," continued my friend. "It's enough to
put one off of sex forever. Whenever I see one of
those women coming in those tight spandex dresses that
show everything, all I want to do is run!" I used to
be that way. I used to equate sex with love. Back in
the 1960s, almost every man in Berkeley wanted me
because I was HOT. But none of them loved me for
myself. But then finally it dawned on me. Men DO NOT
equate sex with love. Except perhaps for Tiger Woods.
I totally understand where these women are coming
from. I used to be that way too.
"Will somebody PLEEZE up the supply of eligible Black
men so I can just get on with my life!" sighed my
friend.
Hey, that's easy to do. Let's stop putting so many
African-American men in jail for crimes that don't
involve others (such as Lil' Wayne being jailed for
smoking pot and owning guns -- where is the NRA when
you really need it?) and spend all the tax money we
save on better schools and more jobs. Problem solved.
And then I got to thinking about how my friend's
situation might also apply to the men of Afghanistan
and Iraq. Perhaps as many as one million men have been
killed over there in the last nine years, plus, to
quote a recent article in Yahoo News, "Cancer is
spreading like wildfire in Iraq.... The cancer rate in
the province of Babil, south of Baghdad, has risen
from 500 diagnosed cases in 2004 to 9,082 in 2009."
Just think about that.
What if the women of Iraq and Afghanistan are now
developing "Motherhood Fever" too? Then the
counterinsurgents will not only have to be out
fighting off the U.S. military all the time, but also
they will have to be spending every spare moment
fighting off prospective brides as well. With all that
cat-fighting going on, it's becoming like an Afghan
version of "The Bachelor".
I got an answer to that problem too. Just ship all the
excess women that have been created by "war" in the
Middle East off to China. There's a vast shortage of
women in rural China I've been told. Arab women would
be appreciated in rural China. And I bet that
African-American women would be appreciated there too.
Heck, ship me off there as well -- but I would prefer
not to marry a farmer. Plowing ruins the nails.
PS: I think that white American women probably also
have the same problem as African-American and Arab
women. Apparently the toll on the number of eligible
white American males as a result of the "wars" in Iraq
and Afghanistan has been fairly high too -- much
higher than we think. There are a lot less American
men than there used to be due to all those unnecessary
Bush-Obama administration "wars" in the Middle East.
If you don't just count the soldiers who have died
in-country but also count in all those soldiers who
died after being evacuated, all the military suicides,
all the victims of Gulf War Syndrome, all the violent
deaths of victims of returned soldiers with PTSD and
all the soldiers who nobody would want to marry anyway
because they have already died inside their minds
after returning from the horrors of those wars, then
you have a significantly lower number of eligible
white American men for all America's desperate "Bachelorettes".
According to Army Times, "Americans should prepare to
accept hundreds of U.S. casualties each month in
Afghanistan during spring offensives with enemy
forces." Then they quote Gen. Barry McCaffrey, an
adjunct professor of international affairs at the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point as saying, “What I want
to do is signal that this thing is going to be $5
billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed
and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we
probably should expect. And that’s light casualties,"
Long-time war correspondent Lori Gricker just
published a book entitled, "Afterwar: Veterans From a
World of Conflict". In Chris Hedges' review of
Gricker's book in the Los Angeles Times, he stated
that, "Those who pay the price, those who are maimed
forever by war, are shunted aside, crumpled up and
thrown away. They are war's refuse. We do not see
them. We do not hear them.... The message they bring
is too painful for us to hear." But these huge numbers
of American men who are no longer on the marriage
market still exist.
"How many?" you might ask.
In 2007, blogger-activist Clive Boustred collected
data from a Veterans Administration website and added
up the figures. "On page 7 of the official VA report,
the number of U.S. soldiers partaking in the illegal
invasion of the Gulf is listed as 6,838,541 soldiers.
Just below that the VA estimated number of living
soldiers is listed at 4,525,865. In other words
2,312,676 US Gulf War Veterans are dead! Not many
active duty soldiers serving from 1990 are likely to
have died from old age or natural causes by April
2007. The report details deaths in various conflicts
as reported to the VA by DoD, utterly contradicting
the government and mainstream media number of 4,000
dead."
With regard to the more recent Middle East "wars,"
Boustred supplied the following information: "Total
U.S. Military Gulf War Deaths: 73,846," based on
17,847 deployed deaths and 55,999 non-deployed deaths.
"Total number of disability claims filed: 1,620,906.
Disability Claims amongst Deployed: 407,911. Total
'Undiagnosed Illness' (UDX) claims: 14,874. Disability
Claims amongst Non-Deployed: 1,212,995." And that
number has probably risen considerably since 2007.
That's a whole big bunch of non-eligible marriageable
men!
According to journalist T. Christian Miller, there is
also a big problem among contractors who worked abroad
for such companies as Blackwater and KBR and came back
disabled and maimed for life. Are they being counted
too? Not according to Miller. In an article entitled,
"Injured Abroad, Neglected at Home: Labor Dept. Slow
to Help War Zone Contractors," Miller stated that,
"More than 1,600 civilian [contractors] have died and
37,000 have reported injuries."
I myself wrote an article on the subject of injured
returned contractors -- regarding an acquaintance of
mine named Dave Crow. Dave allegedly committed suicide
after returning from Iraq, where he was exposed to
toxic waste. Whether he killed himself or died some
other way, Dave had become a "Dead Man Walking" from
the moment he came home from Iraq. "I was only over
there for four months," he told me. "I was a truck
driver for KBR. The money was good. But our camp was
located over the site of a former depleted uranium
dump and I got really sick. My body started just
wasting away and now I'm weak, unhealthy, living in a
trailer outside of San Diego and basically screwed
up." Our Dave is now dead. No wedding date for him.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jane_sti_080312_death_on_the_freeway.htm
PPS: in Argentina last month, I heard a lot of talk
about the mistreatment of both soldiers and veterans
of the Falkland Island wars. Apparently Argentina's
military dictatorship had wanted this war as a means
of distracting people away from hatred of their
totalitarian regime. So the dictatorship sent a bunch
of ill-equipped and ill-trained young boys out to the
Falklands in sub-zero-degree temperatures to die
horrendous, painful and unnecessary deaths for no
reason. These boys were not even given warm overcoats.
Many -- if not most -- of them simply froze to death.
Argentinians are still really pissed off about that --
especially the women.
And if I was a young Afghan, Iraqi or American woman
today, I would be pissed off too -- and angry enough
to put an end to all war!
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