An odd thing came to me last night as I talked to a despairing veteran of the first Gulf War. We two are at political odds, I am one of those ‘damned liberals’ and she is conservative. She is hurt by my rants here and at the forum because she says it means I am against HER…as a veteran, as someone that was in a war in the Mideast.
So, here (as elsewhere) let me clarify. I AM a veteran and my eldest son is a veteran of the same Gulf War period she is, as well as having served during this war. I am NOT against the veterans who fought either war; THEY are the reason I am so adamantly opposed to this war. I feel their blood and lives are being drained away for lies and oil. I get pissed at many GOP politicians because they foist this false dichotomy thinking on vets who are too busy living (and sometimes dying) to muddle through political sensibilities. They make statements that liberals like me are anti-war and therefore anti-vet. It simply isn’t true.
Between my family and my husband’s family, we have had someone in uniform in every American war since before the Revolution. How could I possibly be anti-vet? It is pro-military to insist their lives not be wasted on the wrong wars for the wrong reasons. I do not hold the vets responsible for things that have gone so wrong in the war, for the most part, their orders and what they can and cannot do is guided from above, particularly in this war.
The government has lowered American standards in ways that American troops will pay for at war for generations to come. It makes me want to pound my head on a wall when I think of how it will be for American prisoners because of actions insisted upon by our government in this war. And I cry for the soldiers who may have left the military, and in some cases, left life because they could not bear that change in American behavior. I want to ask those forked-tongue politicians since when is it unpatriotic to indulge in dissent. Government of, by, and for the people, remember? All the people, not just the ones who agree with whichever party has control of Congress at a given juncture in time, that is how it is supposed to work. But at the end of our discussion, when I validated both my fury and despair at the Washington D.C. decision makers AND my worry over and affection for her, the snow tumbled out of the sky and winter closed in for the night.
January usually brings at least one snow, so just getting it in under the line, this morning was the sound-dampened white-flocked morning we had been waiting for all month. The photo is the central stone, with its 4900 beads numbering the U.S. and Coalition troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I keep the beads up to the nearest full ‘century’ of men and women.
