52 Reasons to Love A Vet

​Mike Wimmer: King of HeartsThe King of Hearts playing card has an intriguing, even mysterious image. People have long noticed the King of Hearts’ curious pose. It shows the king holding a sword behind his head. Or is he stabbing himself? Because of his pose the card has been called the suicide king. In tarot, lore the King of Hearts was also known as the King of Chalices.
I chose to portray the King of Hearts as Uncle Sam pouring out the valuable blood of his children and symbolically committing suicide with his sword. America in its quest to conquer the world through globalism and consumerism all too casually throws away its own future by pouring out the precious blood of our young men and women for political expediency; or in the case of these last 12 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the maniacal belief that America could impose its brand of cultural superiority, in the guise of democracy, on a people that have fought with each other for the past 3000 years; a crazy idea, which perfectly symbolizes the original King of Hearts, “ King Charles VII of France”, who was known to go mad. I, like many, have had to witness the effects of such thinking within my own family. My nephew John David was a bright young man who could not attain a college education because his family, like so many others in America, could not afford the escalating costs of higher education. John, who was always a sweet child, with no athletic ability, lost himself in playing video games and wanted to learn computer programming. He saw the military as his only chance to attain his college dreams and enlisted. His intelligence was quickly noticed, where he was chosen for training and later served in Afghanistan as a computer and intelligence analyst for target acquisition. The constant strain of life and death choices and the introduction to a drug culture within the military eventually led him to his emotional breakdown. After returning stateside and enrolling into college he found himself struggling with addiction and an inability to concentrate. John eventually dropped out of college where he found himself ill-prepared to make it on his own, so he moved in with his parents. One day after a small fender-bender he found himself at his wits end and took a gun and locked himself in his room and shot himself in the head. A terrible tragedy. Another statistic. Another life lost for a war that brought nothing of value to the United States at an estimated cost of some $3,000,000,000,000.00 (3 trillion dollars). Trillions that enriched the Corporations of war and energy, but with none left over to help the healing of our soldiers. So my “King of Hearts” has become the “King of Broken Hearts” and serves as a visual metaphor on a game that has only losers.