Guilt can only weigh on a person's mind for so long before they crave the act of purgation; to get the weighty feelings of shame and responsibility out of the mind - or at least the guilty parties attempt to find some kind of peace if they cannot rid themselves of a screaming conscience that implicates and indicts its possessor.
I wanted to edit this, but it would have made me feel, well...guilty.
That said, perhaps some readers will understand why my friends and I rip yellow ribbon "support the troops" magnets off of cars or wherever people have affixed them. By ripping off these ribbons, we find a way to deal with our guilt, as though with each ribbon swiped we take back a life that was taken by this senseless war started by our senseless president and those who support him.
| Priceless example of self-pity and self-loathing. It's all about him. |
I will never say, "support the troops." I don't believe in the validity of that statement.
| Which puts you on the other side, right there. |
People say, "I don't support the war, I support the troops" as though you can actually separate the two.
I wondered how Kerry supported the troops but not the war.
| He didn't really, he just said he did. All his pro-military talk was just that -- talk. John's never been much when it's come to actually using the power of his office to get something done, which explains why the Left endorsed him as their man. |
You cannot; the troops are a part of the war, they have become the war and there is no valid dissection of the two. Other people shout with glaring eyes that we should give up our politics, give up our political affiliations in favor of "just supporting the troops." I wish everything were that easy.
| No, it's not that easy at all; you'd have to think your way through a philosophy that has you supporting thugs, butchers and rapists like Saddam and his evil spawn. You'd have to explain how you came to loathe personal liberty, human rights and democracy when a Republican president happens to be the guy making it happen in an important part of the world. Most of all, you'd have to explain your own racism that causes you to believe that the 'little brown people' of Iraq and Afghanistan don't deserve to have what you have. |
What they really mean is that we should just give up our will, give up our identities, give up our voices to those in power.
| Seeing as you've already given up your common sense and your moral compass, the rest really isn't so much, is it? |
Perhaps that's just the way people aligned with the right wing choose to get rid of their guilt: blindness and ignorance.
I don't want you to "give up your will", just don't count me and anyone else who happens to disagree with you as stupid!
| But he has to. He's in the classic "Trap of the Left"™ -- how can it be that we sheep don't listen and obey the likes of him? He's the smart one, remember, he and his leftie pals have it all figured out. We're supposed to listen to them because they know what's best (see also, European Union). So if we don't, there can only be a couple of explanations: either we sheep really are stupid, or we sheep have been twisted and perverted by wolves like Karl Rove. Very often both explanations are invoked. But you'll never hear this young man ask himself whether he might just be wrong. He's trapped. |
I listen to talk radio very often. It's important to know who your enemies are. The pundits on the radio are the pinnacles of guiltless, shameless wonders, and I am jealous. It must feel good to believe without question, to benefit from the blind belief of young men ...
(including my son)
... and women who chose to join the armed forces, to sit in a radio studio in New York and admonish the public to give in like the troops, to just follow orders, to live as just a number that will soon be etched into a gravestone that no one will ever see.
| Most of the conservative talk show hosts generally do the opposite: they try to provoke people into thinking for themselves. Even Al Franken has figured that out. |
I look into the cars of people with "support the troops" ribbons as I speed past, trying to find some trace of recognition on their face, recognition of their guilt and the fact that they have given up. I usually see nothing; just a mouth moving robotically, singing the pop hits of today or the contemporary country wine of fake cowboys who share a lot with George Bush: no shame. Right. No shame. Just pride. Read some of the good news, once.
| Right, and this young fella hasn't figured out that we're not thinking about deep issues on a minute-by-minute basis. Life goes on. We reflect on issues when we have time to do so, and it's then that we remember why we have a yellow ribbon on our cars: to think those who have made enormous sacrifices on our behalf. |
We say, "support the troops" so that we won't feel guilty about saying "no" to war.
| We thank the troops because we support the war. Don't put words in my mouth, young man -- I support the liberation of 50 million people from the evil Taliban and Saddam's evil spawn sons. |
We reason that if we say that we support the troops, somehow we aren't monsters for not saying a word when the death tolls of U.S. soldiers climbed above 1,000. Those ribbons are yellow for a reason, they are not the mark of armed forces support, they are the mark of cowards. This MUST be a college student.
We're not monsters even if the death toll would have been 10,000, which some people projected before the war began. We're people who've thought through what it means to extend the blessings and the challenges of liberty to other people halfway around the war whom we don't know. We're people who saw the pictures of the young woman in the soccer stadium in Kabul being executed by a mulllah, we're people who heard the testimony of grieving families in the marshes, we're people who saw pictures of the mass graves of women and children.
And we said, "somebody has to put a stop to that." That somebody was us, and we take pride in that. |
Pundits on the radio advise their cowardly listeners to approach men and women in army uniforms and say "thank you." I cannot do that. Every time I pass a person in uniform I look long and hard at them and all I can think inside to say is "I'm so sorry." I want to apologize to them, to their families and to their friends. I feel sorry that we, the people, couldn't control our own government at the outset of this conflict when most of us knew deep inside that it was a mistake.
| Only a college student can be this narcissistic. When you finish college and get into the real world, Skippy, you'll find that we do control our government, and it did what we wanted it to do. |
Where are we now? Are we in a better place? Is the world safer for democracy? No, it is not safer and we are not in a better place.
| Fifty million people freed from tyranny, Saddam drug out of a septic tank, the Taliban reduced to a pack of cowardly fools, al-Qaeda on the run, and all the ancillary benefits from the West Bank to Libya to the UAE. Those all look better to me than just a few years ago. It certainly looks better than I ever thought the world would look when I woke up on September 12th. |
In this war that we are fighting to somehow avenge the deaths of the Sept. 11 tragedy, we have amassed a field of body bags, the number of which almost matches the number killed in the terrorist attacks four years ago.
| First, it doesn't, and second, that's a moral equivocation that we won't let you get away with. These deaths, soldiers and civilians, are at the hands of the same people -- the thugs, the jihadis, the haters who think that their particular interpretation of the Qur'an and their lust for gold and bejeweled turbans permits them to kill you and me. The citizens who died on September 11th were among the first casualties in this new war, but they're not the last, and our soldiers may well continue to die when they're sent into harms way. But civilian or soldier, they're fighting for and part of what we are and what we have as a country and a way of life. |
Now, we stare at yet another request for barrels of money for this war by President Bush, while people in our own country search fruitlessly for jobs to feed their starving families, while every public school gets left behind, while our elderly are ensured an uncertain future of unpaid medical bills.
| And how will you feed your family -- I ask rhetorically because you're a callow college student who has yet to be responsible for anything -- when the country comes crashing down in the aftermath of a dozen more September 11th's? When Europe falls apart and becomes Eurabia? When decent people around the world are so terrorized that they either surrender or, even worse, lash out blindly? You strike me as one of those college wankers who'd walk around with a sign that says, "Down with Western Civilization", not realizing that you'd be dead on the final day. |
I guess we shouldn't think about those things though, right? We should just buy a yellow magnet and slap it on the butt of our car so we can sleep at night and just let our government do whatever they want. That's supporting the troops, right?
Maybe a high-school student.
| Yellow ribbons are a start -- we adults have also realized that we have to pay our taxes so that our troops have what they need in the field and so that our good people in government can do their jobs. We have to be willing to let our kids join the military. We have to stand up against the wankers of the world who spout nonsense. We have to stand for something, and we do. Fortunately, a yellow ribbon is a conveniennt symbol to show that we've done all that. |
Two years ago my friend Eric called me out of the blue after almost five years of silence between us. We were in a band together when we were teenagers and he had joined the army around the time I was graduating from high school. He had to join the army; he had a son to provide for in the grand tradition of many young members of the armed forces. He called me to tell me that he was going back to Iraq, against his will. He was so sad and angry and scared. He didn't say it, but I know he was calling to tell me that he might die. I didn't say it to him then, but I felt such overwhelming guilt that I couldn't do anything to keep him from going back.
I haven't heard from him since.
Maybe since he understand your politics?
I don't know if he's dead, and my guilt is alive and well. I hope that all of our family members in harm's way return alive. Until then, I can really honor their sacrifice by demanding that it finally comes to an end.
When it's over, but not to assuage your "guilt".
| He'll be off on something else by then, saving whales or wearing a Che T-shirt to show how cool he is. Maybe he thinks college girls will find him interesting. |
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