A lot of people post things in support of the troops. I am cool with that. I am all for supporting the troops.
Whenever this happens though, you will often get people who are pissed off about the wars, and about the government, and about the direction that things have gone. Believe it or not, I am cool with that too. I understand what they are getting at and where they are coming from.
What I am not cool with is that the response to these people is almost always a personal attack, with a liberal application of jingoistic slogans and references to 911.
People who get the most pissed off about our government’s military actions are generally not anti-troops. You don’t have to protect us from them. They are on our side too.
What may be a good idea though is to take a step back, and read what they posted and think about it. Google a bit. Ask questions. Don’t just jingoistically wave the flag and sing the praises of the troops while invoking the image of 911 as the answer to all the concerns you might have.
Yes, 911 happened. A lot of people died that day. That number though is dwarfed by the number of people killed in the decade since. That number is dwarfed by the number of men women and children who will never see another birthday, who will never see their families again. Most of them were only guilty of being in the country that our leaders decided to attack under the guise of tracking down a non-state entity.
By non-state entity I mean that we officially went to war against a group equivalent to the Mafia, only smaller and less well armed. We did not declare war on a specific country.
There are politicians that will still use the argument “They hate us because we are free!”
Guess what, they hate us because we bombed their neighbors. They hate us because we used words like “Crusade” and “Jihad” to describe a war not only on a group of people, but on the religion that group claims to follow. They hate us because having a Muslim sounding name is all that it takes in some places to get picked up off the streets and not see your family for four years… That is totally ignoring the fact that at the end of those four years you were dropped off in a random Middle Eastern country where you have no connections, have never been, and don’t even speak the language (That guy was Canadian, picked up in Canada at the request of our Government).
This is the sort of thing our government is doing in our name. They send our troops to faraway lands to cause massive damage and leave behind massive numbers of casualties, and they claim it is in the name of the “War on Terror.” The troops suffer. The local populations suffer. Their families suffer (both the troops and the locals). The military contractors make millions. And when all is said and done, they like us even less than they did before. Not only do they hate us more than they did before, but most of them don’t even know why we are there. When polls have been done, questioning people in Iraq and Afghanistan, over ninety percent had no clue what happened on 911. First word they got that anything was wrong involved an explosion in their back yard.
And of course, once the dust settles, and the end of hostilities officially arrives, it is only a matter of hours before the oil companies, and the mineral companies have boots on ground securing contracts.