Day 63
Due to a frightening quantity of homework that I've managed to accumulate, this evening's entry will be short, and probably uninteresting.
I think that we admire militarism far too greatly in this country. We have a convention that not 'supporting the troops' is what we call unpatriotic, so much so that the Democrats down south have coined the phrase 'support the troops, not the war.'
Well hold on just a second! Aren't the troops the ones fighting the war? This isn't the 12th century, and as much as I'd love to see it, the president isn't exactly leading the charge on the battlefield. In fact, the only times he actually visits Iraq, no media outlets are notified until after he's back, for fear of assasination attempts.
Any attempt to divorce a war from the people who are the ones actually waging it will only obscure the real problems. Again, politicians are forbidden from blaming anybody aside from other politicians and upper-level leaders, which makes things very difficult. To say the I support the people who are literally fighting the war, who volunteered to fight, but that I don't support the war itself, is to speak a contradiction.
Anyway. In the words of Gloria Steinem: “from George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people.”
I think that we admire militarism far too greatly in this country. We have a convention that not 'supporting the troops' is what we call unpatriotic, so much so that the Democrats down south have coined the phrase 'support the troops, not the war.'
Well hold on just a second! Aren't the troops the ones fighting the war? This isn't the 12th century, and as much as I'd love to see it, the president isn't exactly leading the charge on the battlefield. In fact, the only times he actually visits Iraq, no media outlets are notified until after he's back, for fear of assasination attempts.
Any attempt to divorce a war from the people who are the ones actually waging it will only obscure the real problems. Again, politicians are forbidden from blaming anybody aside from other politicians and upper-level leaders, which makes things very difficult. To say the I support the people who are literally fighting the war, who volunteered to fight, but that I don't support the war itself, is to speak a contradiction.
Anyway. In the words of Gloria Steinem: “from George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people.”
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