Politically Homeless - Seeking Common Sense

Real people, real letters, real problems, no solutions.

Politics these days have become so divided and divisive that it’s become the norm to view the other side of the aisle as “the enemy”. People are being told to “pick a side” and that there’s no room for middle ground. We here at Phetasy believe that there are a lot more people in the middle than politicians and the media would have us believe.

We’re collecting stories from the ever growing number of people who are finding themselves Politically Homeless and posting them here on Substack. If you have moved from conservative to liberal, or liberal to conservative, if you feel you’ve stayed in the same place and your party has swerved drastically away from you, if you had a moment that awakened you to the insanity and hypocrisy on both sides, if you keep your mouth shut anytime a political topic comes up because you’re afraid your opinion will cause you to lose friends or your job, you’re not as alone as you might think.

Our goal is to shine a light on people’s earnest, individual experiences and show them they’re not alone.

Some letters have been edited for clarity and brevity. If you’re politically homeless and would like to share your story, please email us at iampoliticallyhomeless@gmail.com. All submissions will remain anonymous.

Letter 23:

It was a clear late summer morning in Pensacola FL, and the date was September 11^th. I was in Officer Candidate School for the United States Navy.  It was a morning Just like any other up to that point, we had our morning PT, followed by Breakfast and shower and our class was getting ready for our first academic class of the day.  It was then I heard a bustling behind me, I stepped out into the hall and asked what was going on. Someone said something about a plane having hit the world trade center and there was a lot of confusion.  We then heard someone call out for the class to line up, we all scurried to the main hallway and lined up like we had a couple dozen times before. We then saw our class Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Burns step out into the hallway. He stood there a moment, then he spoke “I just saw a jetliner fly into the second tower of the World Trade Center. Our country is at war.”

That was it, that was the moment that everything changed.  The difference between why I was in the military on September 10th and why I was in the military on September 12th, is frankly hard to put into words. But being from New York, what happened on September 11^th was deeply personal. I had my own home attacked and I knew people who never came out of the towers that day. No one's life wasn’t touched on that day in that part of the country. It is why September 11^th has always been so personal for me, and why I can never understand people who said it didn’t affect them all that much.

In 2010 I would get tapped to head to Afghanistan for a 12-month deployment. It was here that I would see some of the most galling hypocrisy from our elected leaders. While my job had nothing to do with incoming VIPs (see politicians), I worked at the command that had to deal with those folks who would come to our base in southern Afghanistan.

While it was a very large base, it also had a propensity to get Chinese made 103mm rockets shot at it at night which is why it was considered one of the more dangerous places for these folks to visit.  Their “visit” would usually be them getting off the plane, staying just long enough to get a photo op with the local commanding general and then run away. There is no way to really get an understanding of what was going on in the war doing this. However, it was guaranteed that within the next few days the same politician would be on Fox News or MSNBC talking about their “very dangerous” trip to Afghanistan. The only exception to this, John McCain, that guy didn’t care about getting shot at and it showed. But the show our leaders were putting on was just that, nothing more than a TV produced show to make them look good; the outcome of the war and why we were risking our necks over there was a complete afterthought.

For most vets after you get back and leave the military there is commonly a sense of being where you don’t belong. One of the major contributing factors for this feeling in me was the fact that so many people were completely oblivious to the fact that we were still at war in 2012 and 2013. It was extremely important for those of us who had been overseas, but for most people it had simply slipped from the headlines, and their minds. As some people said while I was in “The marines went to war, America went to the mall”.  But also, America had turned inward on itself and cared more about politics than anything going on in the world, politics had become king.

The thing that broke me more than anything else was the 2016 election. I could see in that moment that American leadership was a complete failure, there was no left, no right, just small people vying for whatever small bits of power they could get their hands on. It was flatly obvious to me that Hilary Clinton was a despicable corrupt politico who couldn’t relate to any normal human being.  Similarly, I could see just plain as day that the entire Donald Trump campaign was a giant troll on American politics, and he didn’t care about improving people's lives one iota, he just loved the crowd’s adulation. So, like the song says, here we are stuck in the middle, seeking common sense through the noise of Facebook and Twitter. Luckily it seems that there are more and more people who are looking for that, here's hoping there are enough to turn the West around. 

Sincerely,

Politically Homeless

Some letters have been edited for clarity and brevity. If you'd like to share your story, email us at iampoliticallyhomeless@gmail.com. All submissions will remain anonymous.