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Originally Posted by Alex Stroup
Here is good news currently found on the home page of CNN. Some require certain specific worldviews, however.
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I'd mojo you for that post, funny stuff.
The issue of "support" hits home for me because my brother is in the Air Force. No, he's not deployed and in all likelyhood won't be, thank God. Even so, he's a part of the war machine. He has always had a conservative world view and that has intensified 10X since he's enlisted. Why? Because he has to view the world that way.
At one point he said to me that it's a given that he'd be a Republican because any time the Dems get in office the defense spending is cut. He was told stories by his fellow officers that in the Clinton years they didn't have money for tools and other necessities. I told him that I'm in a vice versa situation - any time Republicans get in control, education spending is cut, which chops into my own workplace.
We had a moment where we realized that we had ended up on diametrically opposed sides of a cliff...and then we let it go.
Anyway. Do I "support" my brother and what he's bought into? No. I understand that there is a need for a defense, same way there's a need for log-rolling politicians and slick marketing executives (or rather, the lemmings that work beneath these figureheads that actually muck around in the slime for them). These are ugly occupations to me, the true dirty work. I dislike their very existance but they are a part of us, and I can't deny that.
So, we have to have people ready to kill at a moment's notice, or we'll all get killed by the rest of the world. This is the way it is. And these people MUST be robots, MUST be brainwashed, because otherwise they may not kill for us, and we'll die.
I saw what they did to my brother's rebellious nature when I visited him after his bootcamp. He was a half-starved shell of a person, flinching at every person that came into the room, eyes dodging about, making sure he was what he needed to be at all times. This was just Air Force boot camp, the easiest of the branches.
I do not blame them morally for any wars that they are sent to fight. They have been trained to do so. Their point of view has been washed down the drain. By the time they are sent to kill they are not people like you and I anymore. They can't be.
I feel sorry for them. They are victims of the system and victims of society. Yes, they are heroes. Yes, they help protect us. In fact, I know that there are people that were born to do this, and are great at it. God bless them for doing the dirty work that I could never do, the poor bastards.
I know this has nothing to do with this war in particular, and that's fine by me, as I hate even thinking about the can of worms this country is in, no matter how you look at it.