Month: September 2017

Prior to my enlistment in the Navy, I had a good sense of patriotism and the significance of the National Anthem. But as I took the oath to defend the United States with my life, suddenlythat theme meant a whole lot more to me. Even now when I hear the anthem I can’t help but swell with pride in what our nation has accomplished above all others.

I will be the first to admit I was a little turned off by Colin Kaepernick sitting out the national anthem last year. He did so not at the height of his career but when it was in decline and he had little to lose. He was also a 49er and as a dedicated fan of the Seattle Seahawks, I was already bias against him. But that was the extent of it. I didn’t actually object to him sitting down, I served our country to maintain his right to do so. I didn’t agree with his form of protest but I certainly wouldn’t condemn him for it. For his own reasons, he felt compelled to act in a way that he believed was right, and let me be clear, he was RIGHT to do so (even if he was a 49er).

So what does it say about our country when so many are now choosing to sit or kneel rather than stand? Is respect for the flag more important than demanding from our country everything that flag represents? Is standing up and paying honors to a symbol more important than living by what that symbol stands for?

Don’t be angry at those who take a stand by sitting down, I may soon be among them. Listen to their protests, their concerns, are they wrong? Well, ARE THEY? Be mad they are sitting down but don’t be mad at them for doing so, be mad at the reasons why. Use that anger to take a positive action, help them stand back up, not by shaming them but by doing something about the causes that compel them to protest. We have the power to change how we treat those whose skin color doesn’t match our own and how we enforce laws. We are all Americans and we all want to be wrapped equally in that blanket of freedom.

The flag of the United States doesn’t just represent our fallen heroes, it also represents what we aspire to be: a nation of liberty and justice for all. We’ve struggled with that promise and there are those among us who feel that promise hasn’t been kept. Maybe we all need to take a knee until real change is made and every American is treated equally regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation. It is my hope that those who feel they aren’t represented in the red white and blue will one day soon be able to stand with pride when The Star-Spangled Banner is played.  It’s up to all of us to safeguard and uphold the rights and freedoms our fallen heroes fought and died to protect. Sometimes that means sitting down to take a stand.

In order to give my works of speculative fiction a degree of authenticity, I find it important to research how things happened in the past. From there I can project how things might happen in the future. Currently I am working on the beginnings of a galactic war and I must ask what drives all these alien races to fight one another. To help answer that question I turned to our world’s first Great War: World War I.

Prior to my research, my knowledge of WWI could be distilled down to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and something called the ‘Treaty of Versailles’. I knew it led to WWII and that it took place in Europe but the particulars of the ‘Great War’ had been long since lost to me.

One of the first things to jump out at me as I began my research was the concept of trench warfare. I’d heard of trench warfare before and WWI saw this kind of tactic like never before. Unlike wars of the past that involved armies sweeping across vast landmasses, WWI saw the widespread use of the machine gun and suddenly all those soldiers could be mowed down from a considerable distance. The only way to avoid the massacre was to literally dig in below ground and out of sight of the deadly guns.  Both the allies and the central powers did just that in WWI often with little more than the length of a football field separating the two side’s trenches. The space in between was appropriately called ‘no-man’s land’ for anyone caught between the two sides would surely be killed.

This effectively turned WWI into a war of attrition, a stalemate.  With both sides entrenched and neither wanting to risk certain death by crossing to the other side, they sat and waited hoping the misery of the trench would drive the other side to surrender first.

It occurred to me how appropriately trench warfare is analogous to the current political climate in the United States. In 2017 we are engaging in trench warfare with each other. The trenches aren’t physical, they’re ideological. Instead of guns, we hurl words and protests at our ‘enemy’. Anyone who isn’t in our trench must be in the enemy trench. If you’re a republican but don’t support Trump, you’re in no man’s land. If you are progressive but don’t like the establishment of the Democratic Party, you’re in no-man’s land. But being caught in no-man’s land means certain doom so pick a trench because right now, there is no middle ground (at least that’s the current perception). It’s a war of attrition and one side will either win or both sides will lose horribly.

What did WWI teach us about trench warfare? It was stupid, a lot of people died for no reason and by the end of the war nothing was really gained by it. In the case of WWI, the central powers ultimately lost. While they had better trenches and better weapons, they lacked the necessary influx of supplies to sustain war indefinitely. The allies technically won the war but with so many dead and so little disputed territory changing hands, what was it all for? Everyone was broke by the war’s end and with so much focus on fighting, resources weren’t sent to the real threat that emerged; the Spanish flu which ended up killing more people globally than WWI!

What lessons can we learn then in our ideological trench war today? Does one side have to completely surrender to the other? Do we hold our line so firmly the entire country falls apart by the end?  Do we turn our ideological war into a physical war and shed more blood to test the constitution of this country? Or do we lay down are weapons and climb out of the trenches, see our ‘enemy’ as the neighbor they’ve always been? Trench warfare doesn’t work. No one truly wins in the end and if we continue on our current course, we will not have learned the lessons so many died to teach us.

The media, the President, even friends and family may tell us we have to pick a side and no matter what, we have to stay there. I say bullshit. I want to believe that most of us are actually in no-man’s land right now; that only those in a position of power and authority over us are truly engaged in the trench war. The difference between the soldiers of WWI and the American people today is that unlike the soldiers of the past, we have the power to get out of the trench and pull our leaders out with us.

“Okay Jen, how do you suggest we get out of the trenches?”

I think it starts with listening. We hear the words, how can we not? Both sides are shouting at the top of their lungs but are we truly listening? The truth is we may never agree on everything or maybe not on anything but somewhere along the road we stopped listening to the other side and they stopped listening to us. At some point we begin building our trenches and now we’re entrenched. But the idea is not to convince a Trump supporter that he is wrong or a liberal that she is naive; that’s just trying to drag one person out of one trench and into another. The idea is to hear the other side and truly empathize with why they feel the way they do. No man’s land really is the common ground between trenches. From common ground we can work on common goals. Only if we work together can we end our ideological trench standoff. We’re in this test of democracy together after all.