The Death of Eros : Part One

Weird things happened while I was gone in the military for 5 years. Really weird.

UPDATE : This article by Midwestern Doctor helps provide a reference for what I was trying to suggest when I wrote this stack. I may have waxed poetic because I was trying to convey my deepest emotions at the time. Many people reading it may not have understood exactly what I was hinting at. For example, what was I suggesting had happened to eros between men and women? There is hard science at this link that confirms a lot of what I was trying to say. (Summarizing the article, endocrinal disruptors leave people hollow shells with no real emotions and no ability to pair-bond.)

I had enrolled in Denison Community College in Texas in 1985 when I was discharged. The Army G.I. Bill was guaranteed to back me through college but the school there had simply billed me and told me to sort it out with the government, which wasn’t how it was supposed to work at all. They were obligated to bill the government but the people who worked there didn’t know how to do that and didn’t admit it until I had been in class for a semester. I ended up with student debt despite my contractual assurance that my tuition was supposed to be managed by the Veteran’s Administration.

I started as I had so many times in a new place … optimistic and relatively cheerful, hoping things were going to be okay in life. I kept praying that the mysterious sludge I had to navigate like knee-deep tar would ease up and my life would become as straightforward as everybody else’s seemed to be. I kept thinking that the change of surroundings and the return to civilian life meant that never-ending customized version of hell in the military would be over for me. My last year had not been too bad with the Brigadier General at Fort Riley overseeing my treatment. Hopefully nobody cared enough either way in the civilian world to go out of their way to impose the “special conditions” the military did for 3 and a 1/2 years.

One of the things I observed about Americans when I got back after being away in the Army for half a decade was that they were all mean as sin. These were people who were well fed, who lived free of fear and want and yet they were real ornery inside and angry about pretty much everything and everybody. There was scarcely a minute with the average American that seemed free of some pressing grievance. Most of them weren’t all there upstairs mentally. I’m not singling anybody out. You could see in teachers, administrators, tutors, counselors and the students that all of them were swollen with contempt for the nation, themselves and ultimately God Almighty. Everything was ironic. Everything was to be resented. There was no gratitude in them at all … the emotion that separates us from the lower animals. The spiritual expression of the frontal lobes - the seat of civilization - was missing altogether. I think they call it “woke” now. I regarded it as a somnolent state of intellectual vacuum. The men were mostly bitter and numb … and the women perpetually furious. Kind of like today, in fact. I just notice these things long before the rest of you do.