Fuck.
This is serious. My husband and I live in a small high desert community that is not far from the biggest Marine base in the world. In the seventeen years we've lived here we've always known what the U.S. Military was preparing to do in the Mid-East before anybody else did. After 9-11, and in the lead-up to the Iraqi War, we began to hear and feel them testing artillery at their vast bombing range thirty miles away. From then on over the years -- through Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Libya, Syria, Nigeria, et al -- any time they were planning to escalate raining down death and destruction on those other deserts halfway around the world, the "boom-booms" would get really bad. One week an extravaganza of ordnance...the next week "Shock and Awe" in Baghdad.
There were carpet and cluster bombs, and bunker busters (by far the loudest), that would rock the ground from the base, aiming straight at our house. The place would shake, rattle and roll like a small earthquake was underway. In that first moment it was hard to tell whether it was natural or manmade, but we'd know soon enough, as the bombing (unlike a temblor) would go on and on, sometimes for hours.
For a good while we haven't heard much of that -- through the long hot summer of 2016 and into the horrifying fall. But just now -- exactly one week after Donald Trump's inauguration, just days after his announcement that the U.S. intends to steal the oil from those pesky Iraqi Arabs, and the "Doomsday Clock" was set ahead to 2 ½ minutes before total wipe-out -- the boom-booms are back.
With a vengeance.
Explosion after explosion after explosion. Holy shit, that was a big one!!!
It almost sounds like a message in Morse Code from The Donald or maybe, at 140 blasts, it's actually the first Tweet of Doom. The loud and disquieting tremors are a reminder that in coming months and years -- between POTUS and Putin -- there's gonna be a whole lot of destabilizing going on in the Mid-East, fanning out from there all over the world. And they haven't even gotten to the nukes yet. Today the boom-booms. What's coming tomorrow?
Fuck.