There's an interesting
military-industrial-complex news story making the rounds. Long story short: Department of Defense management-drone Mike Furlong, former Boeing executive, is the subject of an internal criminal investigation over the use of an appropriated $24mil for intelligence gathering. He was supposed to use the money to hire open-knowledge investigators in Afghanistan - old fashioned gumshoe reporting but as government contractors, gathering on-the-ground knowledge where it's always lacking and sorely needed. But it turns out he may have hired investigators to specifically track individuals for targeting by drone-strikes. The military does distinguish between these activities, one is legal, the other is not. (Really in the weeds tidbit: The later one is legal for the CIA, who are catching heat for keeping Blackwater contractors on hire despite all reason for just such a purpose.)
Nothing about the substance of the story itself has any emotional meaning for me. That news story is making me very very sad for a host of reasons, all derived from how I heard about it.
Like I do essentially always unless I'm out of the house, I was sitting at my desk, idly reading this forum or playing one of any time-wasting games, squandering my vacation doing what I do all the time anyway, with the TV on in the corner. Ever since I got cable TV, I can't function for more than a few hours without having a TV on, usually tuned to cable-news. I used to think I was staying informed that way, but I'm constantly shown that I know very little about important happenings in the world, just political horse-race crap of interest to nobody. I've recognized this for some time, and leaving a TV on all the time while sitting at my computer all the time is doing murder on my eyes too, which is sad in itself. But I'm totally digressing here.
Rachel Maddow's show was on, and she was conducting an interview about the above incident. In my defense, as much as leaving the news on all the time has become white-noise to me, I do perk up and attempt to listen when contractors are mentioned. And as the interview closed, I caught the name of a minor figure in the story -
Robert Young Pelton.
A few days after September 11, 2001, I was hanging around my school library, involved in some chat over terrorism. I'd heard the name Osama bin Laden in the mix, and decided to look him up online. This being circa 9/14/2001, only a few thousand hits turned up, as opposed to 6.1 million. One of the first websites I found was the online reprinting of a book titled
The World's Most Dangerous Places, a sort of war-junkie's factbook about nasty happenings and countries, recompiled every few years. It's chief author was Robert Young Pelton. RYP is one of the most experienced, skilled, insightful, driven, and objective war reporters in the world, if not the best there's ever been. And he's a damn good author to boot.
Over the next couple years, I consumed his writing, the website, any articles I found that mentioned him. As highschool ended, I was wracking my brain for what qualification to spend thousands of dollars on and shackle myself to for life, and a new edition of WMDP was released. Seeing my enthusiasm for the subject matter, and my interest in the presidential race that year, my mother suggested I enroll for a Political Science degree, and I thought that was brilliant.
Pelton's persona dominated my imagination of the matter, as it had since 2001, and as it continues to do today. His influence was responsible for the education I've chosen, the career I hope to enter (however tangentially related), and much of the character of my imagination for the past eight years. I've bought four more books by or related to him, and even thought up some novellas inspired by his writing style (including a new one just tonight, as I was shuffling though my braindead job).
Tonight, after I got home from work, I watched the online-hosting of that Rachel Maddow interview. About five times altogether. Not because it was so riveting, but because I couldn't pay attention long enough to catch the five-minute interview in one go. I've so thoroughly conditioned myself to multi-tasking, especially when mah news-TV is involved, that I habitually start doing other stuff while I tell myself I can focus on both. And as I listened to the show, and read that article above, an increasingly familiar sense of horror dawned on me. I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
I didn't understand the story. I didn't really know what was being described. And somewhere in the discussion, it was mentioned that part of that misappropriated money may have gone to founding a blog-site, inspired by
iraqslogger, a blog co-managed by Pelton for a couple years. A blog I had never heard of before. And much like those four books of his I bought, I couldn't bring myself to read more than a page.
The blog is still tabbed open, gathering dust along with books I haven't found time to read in the months and years that I've owned them. The same years that I've never read article not required by a university assignment. The same years that I've never committed so much as a word of those novellas to page. The same years that I've struggled along in a degree program I forgot why I was interested in. The same years that I've forced myself to watch political news that I can barely understand, much less stomach, and come away from somehow even less critically informed than my know-nothing relatives.
And the only reason I even took notice of the issue at all, was because like a Pavlovian dog, I head a name that used to mean something to me, the closest I have to a professional hero. A man whose work I've barely read, and drifted away from out of shear lack of interest, and some deep fear of hitting an issue in his books that once filled me with interest, fear that I'll read something I know I don't understand and will never find a use for. And then the cycle of self-loathing will start all over again, as I reminded, one little problem leading to another, of all the things I don't like about my life, of all the goals I've let slip away, and all the time I wasted instead of even pretending to care about what used to be my dream.
I didn't write those novels, I didn't read those books, I don't follow those blogs, I don't watch that news, I don't turn off that TV anyway, I didn't pay attention in those classes, I didn't try on those essays, I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I want, I don't know where I'm going, I don't have the will to find out, and I don't have the courage to go there.
This news story, at this time on this subject, has finally proven to me that I have absolutely no sense of motivation. The one subject, the one figure, in the world that I've ever claimed or even thought to myself that I had a genuine interest in, I treat exactly the same way I treat everything else in my life: as a chore, to be ignored as long as feasible, and then given as little effort as possible to deal with. And when there's nothing riding on my proactivity or lack thereof, when there's no consequences for "failure" to pursue or understand an issue except a little more mounting self-loathing, my default response is to feign concern to myself and do nothing at all. And this is where's it's gotten me, moping alone, again, about all the time I've wasted and all the ways I'm not what I want to be, without doing anything about it. Because at the end of the day, I'm afraid of trying, of failing, of changing, of even being noticed. And as much as I hate doing nothing and feeling sorry for myself, it's familiar, and comfortable. And that just makes it worse.
My life is a sham, I'm going nowhere, and it's finally crystallized enough that I've "fallen" to shouting my angst into the ether, in the vain and humiliating hope of getting some word of advice or consoling from an anonymous string of text. For the record, no I'm not specifically asking for a response, but fuck I'm posting this for a reason.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9800746 times)