D and I watched a documentary about some Spec.For guys in Afghanistan last night.

Four American soldiers worked with the Afghani Militia and went around to various villages and settlements, working on Intel they'd been given about weapons caches and Taliban activity.

These villages they went to were remote and desolate.  There was no industry, no agricultual opportunities....they couldn't even grow the opium poppies that other viallges relied on for income.  They had nothing.

Except the money that the Taliban gave them as payment for storing the ammo and weapons.

So, the Americans come through, they find the weapons, and they arrest and take into custody the men of the village.  Some of the villages had vehicles, and they blew those up, rendering them useless before they left. 

They leave the women and children behond to fend for themselves.  If you know anything about the Muslim way of life and the Afghani culture, you'll know that women are worth less than a pair of shoes.  These women that were left behind after their men were shipped off to Gitmo and Bagram as Taliban sympathisers and therefore 'war criminals'..they had no future.  They had no way to survive.  No hope of finding a job, of providing for their children.  No food, no way of getting food.  Nothing in their future except the prospect of starvation and perhaps death when the Taliban came back to pick up their goods and found them gone.

The soldiers that raided the villages left them with some supplies.  Some blankets, some toys for the kids, some medicine for the worms that infested their bellies from drinking dirty water.

It all affected me.  It made me angry. It also made me cry.

The thing that reduced me to tears was this:  an American soldier opened up a box of those individual-serving boxes of Froot Loops.  he started to hand them out and before he knew it he was engulfed by a mob of dusty, dirty children, all of them grabbing and hitting and fighting their way to a little box of cereal.

Kids, willing to nearly kill each other for a little box of Kelloggs.  Here we are, in our homes with clean water and electricity.  Here we are, living in a country where even the lowest of the low gets an income from the government, gets money to buy food with.  Here we are, complaining.  Here we are, saying that we're 'entitled' to more.  That we shouldn't have to live in poverty, that our 'guv'ment' should provide us with a comfortable standard of living, that we shouldn't have to work to feed and house our families, that the rest of the community should have to 'fess up some of their money and give it to us so that we can live as large as they are. 

Some of us don't know how good we have it.