Pathetic

So I lost another one.

Another Facebook friend, that is.

I unfriended him after one of his friends called me “pathetic.” Why? Because I commented on a photo that my friend posted – of a little boy trying not to cry as a Marine presented him with an American flag (presumably that had adorned his father’s coffin) – that the father didn’t have to die and war is obviously not the answer, at least not to this kid. My friend’s friends objected to my “Michael Moore tirade” – my friend is a Republican – and chastised me for choosing the wrong time for my “propaganda.” I was willing to hang in there and debate the hawks until someone said, “The Democrats always blame the Republicans for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How pathetic.”

Excuse me?

Wasn’t Dubya the president who invaded a sovereign nation run by a dictator who had formerly been our friend because he was supposedly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction? I thought for sure that was Dubya chuckling in a tuxedo as he pretended to look for WMDs in the Oval Office in a now infamous video created for the 2004 White House Correspondents' Dinner.

That, for me, was the highlight of the Bush presidency, when the man who was appointed Leader of the Free World by his daddy’s pals on the U.S. Supreme Court demonstrated such gravitas and compassion for those who lost sons and daughters in his inexcusable, unjustifiable wars.

And didn’t we invade Afghanistan during Dubya’s watch too? I’m still not sure why. Osama bin Laden was eventually found and slain in Pakistan (during Obama’s watch, it’s important to note). Al Qaeda and the Taliban are both more powerful now than when Dubya took office so I’m not sure what we achieved by mounting these military follies.

Yes, Democrats went along with it, spineless pieces of sh*t that they are, and yes, Obama launched military action in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, kept things going in Iraq and ramped things up in Afghanistan – this man deserves a Nobel Peace Prize as much as I deserve a Pulitzer – but last I checked, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were all part of the Republican administration that took us to war and started us down the road to spending $1,257,566,940,755 on Iraq and Afghanistan – money that could have been spent fixing roads and bridges, building schools and paying teachers, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, curing the sick, securing our ports and funding after-school programs, medical research, college scholarships or whatever else one can think of besides killing Muslims.

Last Saturday’s unfriending behavior notwithstanding, I don’t really want to communicate only with those who think like I do. This particular Republican was charming and witty and I’m sorry to see him go. But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” It matters to me that this little boy had to don a suit for his father’s funeral and will grow up without him because a bunch of rich, old, white conservatives sent his daddy to his death for no frikkin’ reason.

If my Facebook pal thinks this warrants his buddies rewriting history, ridiculing me and implying that I’m “pathetic,” then I have no choice but to make it my mission to eliminate him from my Facebook world.

Mission accomplished.

Call me intolerant, but I can’t be friends with warmongers or their pals.