The Joe Rogan Blog » Conduit to the Gaian Mind » UFC fight for the troops:
"The UFC had a special night this past week where we put on a fight card for the soldiers of Ft. Bragg. The entire night was to highlight traumatic brain injuries and to raise money for the intrepid fallen heroes fund. They’re trying to raise enough money to build a state of the art treatment center for all of these soldiers that are coming back with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Apparently, because technology has improved and they’ve created better armor, more soldiers are surviving, but they’re coming home alive but with severe brain injuries. How many? Well that’s where it just gets fucking crazy, according to a recent Rand Corporation report 19% of returning service members report that they experienced a possible traumatic brain injury while 20% of them report having major depression or post traumatic stress disorder.
Those are some fucking incredible numbers. 20% is something like 300,000 people, and that’s on top of the thousands that have died. The size of the tragedy is almost unimaginable.
The UFC put on the fights so that the only tickets available were given out only to military personal, and they had over 10,000 people wearing camouflage UFC shirts packed into the arena for the event.
...During the Spike TV broadcast they showed profiles of victims of traumatic brain injuries. They were these heart wrenching pieces on these soldiers that came back injured and will never be the same ever again. They showed guys that had giant hunks blown out of their heads.
They showed their families, they showed them struggle to talk and think - it was incredibly heart breaking. Someone’s son, someone’s baby boy - and they’ll never be the same again. I cried during two of them. I just couldn’t help it.
Seeing the pain and the anguish in the faces of the families was just unimaginably sad. I just couldn’t even conceive of what they’re going through.
When you stop and think how fucked up it is that they have to put up a website and do a show to get public donations to set up a center to treat people like this while the government is bailing out financial institutions left and right it just boggles the mind. I mean, shouldn’t that be one of the first things we as a society are taking care of?
I mean, if we’re really operating under the premise that these young soldiers are over there protecting us, shouldn’t we be taking the best care of them possible?
Every day in the news we’re talking about the economy, which is certainly a huge fucking problem in this country, but goddamn, isn’t 300,000 fucked up young people just as big, if not a bigger issue?
And it’s an issue doesn’t get nearly the same amount of attention.
It’s really hard to believe how fucked up our priorities are when it comes to how we take care of the wounded soldiers.
This war wasn’t my idea, and it wasn’t yours, and right now I’m not even focusing on whether it’s justified or not, just the fact that someone thought it was the thing to do. That choice was made, and if that choice was made whoever made it should be responsible for the consequences, and a huge part of that is taking care of the wounded.
They’re trying to raise 60 million for this center, meanwhile the war costs 200 million every fucking day of the week. All they would have to do is pretend the war wasn’t going on for one day it would all get paid for, but I guess that’s just too convenient and logical.
These are gigantic tragedies. These are our brothers and our sisters, and there are thousands of them, and they’ll never be the same again.
We shouldn’t be in a situation where we have to take donations from the public to support a center for these people; it should be something that’s a top priority.
...I try to pay attention as much as possible and read as much as possible about our government and our politics, but the system we operate under just seems like an impossible tangle of bullshit and corruption.
Almost every day there’s something new - a governor goes down for corruption, or a Senator gets caught taking bribes, or a new story comes out about missing billions in the funding of the war - and it just rolls on, and on, and on with no end in sight. One fucked up story piling on top of the next to the point where you just can’t keep track of them all. Did you forget about Gary Condit?
Yeah, I did too. I just thought of him now while I was writing this.
How about Jeff Gannon, the guy that was the ultra right wing white house reporter who was running a gay male escort service on the side? Forgot about him, didn’t you?
Me too.
Remember the Jessica Lynch propaganda clusterfuck?
Mark Foley? I forgot about him too. I wonder how many kids he’s fucked since he got fired?
There’s just too many to remember them all. And they keep coming. New evidence to erode your trust and confidence being delivered to your awareness every single day, all you have to do is pay attention.
We’re being lead by people that are nothing like us.
They’re not cool, they don’t seem particularly nice, and I firmly believe - no tinfoil hat necessary - that they’re at the beck and call of gigantic corporations first, and then the will of the people second.
And it’s probably a pretty distant second..."
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