Protesting War, but Rooting for America

IN THE SUMMER of 1964, an overwhelmingly strong naval force of the empire of north vietnam suddenly, unprovokedly, in a day which was intended to live in infamy, attacked United States navel forces, thus precipitating peninsular, if not global conflict. The fact that all this happened only in the most fertile imaginations of the most fertile American military industrial complex minds didn't, and still doesn't seem to matter. I was nine years old when all this was going on, and my first question was "what, or where in the world is viet nam?" Instead of bothering to look it up, I assumed it was somewhere in Russia, since it seemed as if anything not in the United States was in Russia. By the time I was eleven or twelve I finally had it figured out, but my smug initial assumption about the location of Viet Nam was a classic example of human arrogance, laziness, of human thought processes in general; if you don't know it, make it up. By the time I was a teenager, and the viet nam police action, or whatever it was, had been going on for years, I was tired and sick of it, and I secretly wanted to join the hippies protesting all across America. Not gonna happen. Too young, was I, surrounded by too many conservative patriotic Americans who would've considered such behavior traitorous and criminal. So, I had to wait nearly another twenty years before I got my chance to protest a war. Give credit where credit is due; in America, those wanting to protest war are never kept waiting inordinately long. The main reason I protested the first Persian Gulf War is that I thought we (U.S.A.) were going to lose it. The Iraquis had had all that time to dig in,deep, beneath the sands of Kuwait...Oh, those were the days! Proudly marching down main street with five hundred people, my "no war for oil " sign proudly flying, all cocky and contrary, my dream, (of protesting a war) come true. No, I didn't want America to lose the war. I just feared that it would. Now, former president Clinton accuses the republicans of actually wanting obamacare to fail, indeed, of wanting America fail. There may be a grain of truth to this, just as it may be that I, deep down, wanted the war in Iraq to go badly, to vindicate my opposition to it. I hope not, but it could be. We're like that. Rush Limbaugh, (famous American radio talker), says he wants Obama to fail, because such a failure will awaken the masses to the evil of liberal government. If Obama, and socialism should happen to succeed mightily in America, those like Rush Limbaugh who incessantly critizee liberalism would either have to deny its success, or stop criticizing. Even if Obamacare ends up making the whole world a better place for everyone, you sense that those who criticize it now would keep right on criticizing, such is our basic nature. But at least I got to protest my war. I retired from that pursuit, because one can only afford so many pairs of walking shoes, and, after all, nowadays there's a bunch of wars and rumors of wars to protest, and they just seem to keep on coming.