Musings -- on the editor's mind

I was 20 in April 1975, in San Francisco working as a houseman in a residential hotel for old people. If I read the news, it was one of the San Francisco dailies.

The last American helicopter left Saigon April 30, 1975 as the city fell to the North Vietnamese. Those images are iconic. The greatest nation on earth lost to a rag tag army of peasants wearing funny hats and sandals.

The clearest, strongest message I received from the news media, after the war news of battles and deaths, was that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt. Corrupt was a ubiquitous adjective. The second popular adjective was illegitimate, as in not supported by that country’s citizens.

The government in Afghanistan mirrors South Vietnam’s. They could be direct descendants. The Afghan people are as stuck as their Vietnamese counterparts. And the U.S. government is as culpable today as the Johnson and Nixon regimes were.

This is not an anti-Trump screed. That Barak Obama dealt with, indeed propped up, Afghan thugs is a huge failure on his part. Sadly, this generation of the mainstream media does not make common use of the terms corrupt and illegitimate. Articles on the billions siphoned off by this generation’s crooks in Afghanistan are woefully lacking.

The news media continues the failure they started in not covering this issue in the Iraq war.

The U.S. has been in Afghanistan 15 years and we don’t even yawn, much less talk about it, much less debate it, much less march against it. We are destroying a country as surely as we wrecked Cambodia. We have killed who knows how many hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, traumatized peasants and U.S. military personnel alike and of course pissed away billions of dollars, not that we ever would have spent that money on roads, bridges, education or any of the myriad things our citizens so desperately need.

The story is our leaders have ruined another country and we are once again ruining ourselves and no one is talking about it.

The media can do better. Most of us can be much better citizens.