Proud to Wear the Uniform?

 This is an entry I just made in my personal journal on March 9, 2026.

Watching US v. Mexico in the World Baseball Classic. The players on the US team so often speak of what an honor it is to wear the US uniform and represent the country. And I cry: Bullshit! There isn’t one good God damned thing about this country to celebrate these days. We are the world’s worst rogue nation. We attack other countries at will, international law and common decency be damned. We slash taxes for the ultra-wealthy and spend most of what the government gets from the rest of us on the fucking God damned military. ICE brings terror to our streets. We leave millions without health insurance, then slash what paltry insurance programs we have so even more people will die because they can’t afford health care. It’s hard to say what is our country’s greatest sin, but this one surely is at or near the top. Our president and his goons pander to racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in the most outrageous ways. They scream fraud every time the lose an election, and they want to force the feds to force an election law on the states that would disenfranchise millions of people, especially married women and many adopted people whose current names are not the names on their birth certificates, never mind disenfranchising trans people whose names are not those on their birth certificates. They stop the government from protecting the environment. We imprison more people than any other country in the world, more even than Russia and China, both which are grossly unjust countries. No, there is nothing good about the United States of America these days. We are threatened with becoming just another fascist dictatorship. The one power party would be the Republicans even though they represent only a minority of the population. Donald Trump or some asshole successor of his would be the dictator. We would all have to bend the knee in homage to our oppressors the way the people did in the USSR. So how the hell can anyone be proud to wear this country’s uniform? Beats the hell out of me.

On Trump's Iran War

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to our local newspaper:

President Trump has attacked the sovereign nation of Iran. He insists that we are now at war with Iran, and I suppose we are thanks to his unilateral actions. Trump’s war on Iran is wrong in a great many ways. The American people don’t want it. Congress has not authorized it. It violates the international law that prohibits unprovoked wars of aggression. It is grossly immoral, for Trump’s military is killing thousands of Iranian civilians including even schoolgirls. This unnecessary, illegal, and immoral war is having significantly adverse economic effects. The stock market is down, and oil prices are up—a lot. Surely it is a “high crime” within the meaning of the Constitution’s impeachment clause for a president to begin an illegal war of aggression against a country that was no threat to us when the president attacked. Sadly, at least with regard to the presidency, that impeachment clause has become essentially a dead letter thanks to the extreme partisanship that prevails in Congress. Still, President Trump clearly committed an impeachable high crime when he attacked Iran. That the regime ruling the country he attacked was indeed a very bad regime for the Iranian people and for some of Iran’s neighbors is true. It does not, however, justify what President Trump has done. We all must do whatever we can to make it clear to those in power that we do not support this war, and we must pray for it’s rapid conclusion.

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson