Veteran’s Day? He’d Be Rolling in His Grave

He returned from Korea with ghosts that didn’t speak English. Women starving, babies too weak to suckle, soldiers eating tinned rations while the world cracked open beside them.

So, when he came home and found a chubby daughter in a country of excess, something inside him snarled. He called it disgust, but it was grief. It just came out wrong, like a scream that found the wrong mouth. When he looked at a full plate, he didn’t see comfort ; he saw glutony, imbalance, proof that god had lousy aim. People wondered why he was never a religious man.

Years later, his children, all girls, would inherit the disgust — the same war, still raging, but in their bodies. They learned hunger as a language, discipline as devotion. But where he starved from the outside in, they starved from the inside out. And maybe that’s how history repeats itself when it’s never written down.

Now, he’s buried under a flag that waves for endless wars. The same government that doesn’t properly take care of its own soldiers funds a foreign war machine while veterans eat canned beans in motel rooms. They call it defense spending—but it’s offense, every time, against the poor, against memory, against decency itself.

He’d be rolling in his grave. Not from pride, not from patriotism, but from shame.

Now Cassandra speaks:

“We once fought to stop hunger, didn’t we?
Now we starve people as policy.
We drop bombs with corporate logos and call it democracy.
We feed wars instead of children, fund walls instead of clinics, and call that leadership.
We’ve turned compassion into a security threat.”

The White House waves its flags for Veterans Day, but half the house is gone. The rest is mortgaged to corporations and contractors. The press releases read like obituaries for integrity.

And somewhere, under the soil, a man who once shared his Korean war rations with the starving, probably clenches his jaw and wonders how his country got so full of itself—and so empty inside.