The Colonel’s Words

I have walked in all these places, usually in the mornings when it’s quiet. To know that I’ve walked where literally MILLIONS have been murdered is enough to cause a faith crisis in even the most devout.

I worry for our country. It all starts with little things. Riots. Villainizing one group. Excusing the murder of a few on either side, or using it as an excuse to centralize more power.

I’ve looked into the crematoriums. Walked through the gas chambers. Stood in the fields where the kick of a shoe will bring up a piece of human bone, and stood in a pit filled with millions of shards of human bone like sand on a beach. I’ve rubbed my hand along the walls where firing squads would kill whole families and felt the bullet holes. I stood in the middle of a stadium where 250,000 people were hacked to death with dull machetes and I’ve stared at metal bed frames used to tie people onto so they could electrocute them, and seen the gallows where they hung political prisoners upside down and would lower them into pots of excrement to drown. I’ve seen open holes with mutilated bodies, just hours dead, crushed from being stoned. All as the bodies are being picked at by birds and people merely walk by without a glance. I’ve even seen beheadings, with no rule of law or pretense at justice. The victim just belonging to the wrong group. Groups that I myself couldn’t even tell apart.

There are no pictures, no words, so smells, no sounds or even physical sensations that can impress upon a nation like ours what that is like. Where only 40% of our citizens have ever even owned a passport, and atrocities are relegated to events on Marvel movies.

We need to look within before we try to change what we believe our country to be. If we do not approach each other with true humility, respect and kindness, then my fellow Americans, we must get ready for the horrors I mentioned above. Most of those events have occurred in the last 80 years. Many in the lifetime of the average American still working. They are never as far away from happening as anyone thinks. Each of these events occurred in a single generation, and each was a country destroying its own. Not war. Internal genocide.

I made my career in the military. I will fight if I must. When it comes to that, the people opposing the rule of law will feel as though the very gates of heaven have opened and released the hordes of Hell. It is not a fight that can be won. Let’s not pretend it is now.

All I ask is for all to think about this; Think about where we are, and we’re we are going. What we REALLY have as Americans. Think about how much you will sacrifice if this keeps getting worse; your life? Your spouses, your parents or your child’s? That’s war, and war is the rhetoric being spewed on both sides. It has to stop, and it has to stop from the bottom up. From us.

Or genocide will be more than a word in our history books which are being censored more and more every year. If we fall, it will be an experience our nation will never recover from, because it will make the angers of today feel like a gentle summer breeze compared to the fires of Hell which another, modern, civil war would bring. Humans are capable of unfathomable cruelty and evil. I have seen it, and it lives in all of us.

So please, be humble. Be patient. Be kind.
Or we will all burn.”

“The above was written by USAF Col (Ret) Glenn David Burns, MD., my son. I believe this is an important message from one who has seen and studied much. Amazingly, he has received not only hostile comments but personal attacks from many people he thought of as friends. If there are people in my list of friends who are angered by this, that is your right earned by those who fought and died for that right as well as for our country. Friends don’t harm friends – – even with words.”

– USAF Lt. Col Shiela D. Lawhon, Additional copy and draft editing.

– D.W., Editor