Wednesday, August 24, 2005
"Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts."
This is how the AP begins its supposedly-objective report on how casualties are buried these latter days. The story itself goes on to explain that no one is sure how many graves are actually engraved this way, and that it is all up to the family, although they quote the parents of one fallen soldier as saying they were never asked. Their son "didn't want to be there. That's a fact." I wonder why their son was in the military. I find it hard to believe people want to go through all the rigors of boot camp to be employed building toilets for third world countries. My mother's cousin was angry he only got to go to Iraq after the war was over to rebuild bridges: he apparently wanted to help tear them down. Soldiers kill people and break things. That's their job. But I digress. Given what we hear from the press, from academia and from spineless weenies like Cindy Sheehan, I'm not so convinced peace is ever good for a country. All my life I thought it was. I thought it gave us the leisure to make life better, to improve things. Now the only outcome of peace that I see is to turn the world's only superpower into a country of whining women. By all means mourn for your dead, but don't dishonor their memory. Sheehan moans, "I wanted to take my son to Canada." First of all, lady, he wasn't drafted so there was no need for him to go to Canada. Secondly, he was an adult. Adults make these decisions themselves. Yes, it's very touching to hold up pictures of him as a baby, but that baby wasn't the one killed by terrorists (although they probably would if they could get at it). And now when the military offers to inscribe at no extra charge the military action in which the buried soldier died, the press immediately leaps on the story as some kind of cheap "politicking." The only thing that comes to my mind is, "Have you left no sense of decency?" The short answer is, no.
This is how the AP begins its supposedly-objective report on how casualties are buried these latter days. The story itself goes on to explain that no one is sure how many graves are actually engraved this way, and that it is all up to the family, although they quote the parents of one fallen soldier as saying they were never asked. Their son "didn't want to be there. That's a fact." I wonder why their son was in the military. I find it hard to believe people want to go through all the rigors of boot camp to be employed building toilets for third world countries. My mother's cousin was angry he only got to go to Iraq after the war was over to rebuild bridges: he apparently wanted to help tear them down. Soldiers kill people and break things. That's their job. But I digress. Given what we hear from the press, from academia and from spineless weenies like Cindy Sheehan, I'm not so convinced peace is ever good for a country. All my life I thought it was. I thought it gave us the leisure to make life better, to improve things. Now the only outcome of peace that I see is to turn the world's only superpower into a country of whining women. By all means mourn for your dead, but don't dishonor their memory. Sheehan moans, "I wanted to take my son to Canada." First of all, lady, he wasn't drafted so there was no need for him to go to Canada. Secondly, he was an adult. Adults make these decisions themselves. Yes, it's very touching to hold up pictures of him as a baby, but that baby wasn't the one killed by terrorists (although they probably would if they could get at it). And now when the military offers to inscribe at no extra charge the military action in which the buried soldier died, the press immediately leaps on the story as some kind of cheap "politicking." The only thing that comes to my mind is, "Have you left no sense of decency?" The short answer is, no.
// posted by The Pendragon @ 9:31 AM 
