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Essay: "Loyalty"

Loyalty is like a ladder, rising up from the self, and made of steel at the bottom, signifying the strongest loyalty â€" personal loyalty. Also at this most stable point of highest strength is loyalty to family, children and relatives. The higher you go, the weaker the bonds of loyalty. This is why the ladder turns from wrought iron to oak, pine, rope, and string as it ascends to represent loyalty to other entities, such as friends, wife's family, the boss, co-workers, the government, society, civilization, race, environment, the local ecology and life everywhere else on the planet, including poison ivy, flies, mosquitoes and even nematodes. Notice two big omissions?

Or, loyalty can be expressed, as a pie chart and in percentages of loyalty owed to whom and where. Many times loyalty is a two-way street, with people paying loyalty with loyalty (i.e. gangs, government, gods, etc.). Loyalty can be very profitable. Loyal core-drinkers made thousands of corporate executives rich. Loyalty has gotten millions of soldiers killed. Loyalty in a gang is exploited. It always amazed me the number of loyal (new) gang members so thoughtlessly trade months or years in almost total sensory deprivation for only a few candy bars or an occasional crumb of dope. Astute opportunists, proudly naming themselves, ridiculously, "shot-callers," get lots of mileage from ignorant recruits who need a daddy-substitute.

But loyalty has a bright side too. Think of all those Vietnam veterans who slaughtered the jungle for god and country. John McCain, for example, has murdered more men, animals, plants and planet than a thousand ordinary men. From the high-altitude safety of his supersonic jet, he's dropped jungle-killing poisons, collectively called "defoliants" or "agent orange," so colored to remind grunts to wash their hands when they got some on them. This same, basic formula is being secretly sprayed all over South America in our government's core war. McCain also dropped white phosphorous bombs that rip and burn down the jungle and anything nearby. The news-stalkers have everybody revved-up for a "Black" president, but there is no chance of this. You might have seen how the Republicans stole the last two elections. Before that, they chased off the guy who told us, in 1992, exactly what is happening now (Ross Perot). Before that, we had a people's president. He lasted almost three years before they blew his head off. It seems as though loyalty to the government is rewarded, while loyalty to the common good is punished. Now we have a one-party system. The next step is a dictatorship. Minorities will have to wait a good long time yet, despite the media hype to the contrary. They'll have to wait their turn, after the women, and after the men have wrecked this country so badly that there's virtually nothing left.

Yes, loyalty to government has vast payoffs for those who can mimic sanity while letting their morality get mangled, mauled and maimed. Just look at what happened to those "Heroes of Abu Ghraib." They had the times of their lives, smoking Arabian Black hash and sexually exploiting prisoners. Of 230 pictures, only seven were revealed. All the CIA and FBI psychopaths who murdered the seven anonymous corpses got away. Only three of the sixteen sadists got punished, and now many are back in government employ, enjoying what they do best, or selling their experiences on the net, doing the speaking circuit or, amazingly, recruiting mercenaries for secret government wars all over the world.

Loyalty! It's a ladder that keeps going up, no matter how low you go.

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