If today were any day other than Memorial Day, I wouldn't make it to the end of this sentence without flinging some heartfelt insult at Dick Cheney.
But this day isn't about Dick Cheney, and it sure as hell isn't about my pampered civilian ass. This day is about Americans who died in uniform. This day, by extension, is about the barely noticed cataclysm our country endures every time a combat death cheats an American out of a dad, a mom, a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter, an uncle, an aunt, a cousin, a neighbor, a friend. This day is about loss.
Cheney displayed a basic ingratitude toward that loss in last week's speech at the American Enterprise Institute. The ingratitude is not unique to Cheney. It's a type of ingratitude that's comfortable for many, if not most, of us. It's an accounting trick we do. Something worthy of the crooks at Enron. We take the deaths of soldiers and move them off our balance sheets.
It's only by cooking the books in this way that Cheney could tell his AEI audience about the Bush Administration "policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11." That, after all, is a statement that only makes sense if we accept a definition of "our people" that excludes members of the American military.
I'd like to believe that we would stop accepting that twisted definition of "our people" if the number of American military deaths in the "war on terror" ever surpassed the number of Americans who died on 9/11. I'd like to believe that. But I know it's not true. The military toll surpassed the 9/11 toll way back in 2006. Yet nearly three full years after that tragic milestone and the thousands of deaths it encompasses, Cheney is able to tell us about the "policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11." And we're able to listen, saving our skepticism and outrage for Cheney's more newsworthy claims about waterboarding. We're able to tacitly accept the idea that the military dead don't count as "our people."
But how much is too much? When would the grim arithmetic of all these combat deaths force us to think differently? Would we still accept talk of "policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11" if 100,000 American soldiers died to spare 100 American civilians from a terrorist attack? How about if 1 million soldiers died to spare 10 civilians?
To be fair, our country does set aside today -- this one day out of every year -- to mark the sacrifices made by our military.
To be fair, Cheney made these two statements at AEI:
* "As in all warfare, there have been costs - none higher than the sacrifices of those killed and wounded in our country's service."
* "It's required the commitment of many thousands of troops in two theaters of war, with high points and some low points in both Iraq and Afghanistan - and at every turn, the people of our military carried the heaviest burden."
But scroll through the names below, the Americans killed in Iraq alone. Read their names and ask yourself if Cheney's two sentences, if our Memorial Day sales, if our cookouts, if our three-day weekends show sufficient respect to our war dead and to the families who have lost loved ones forever. Read their names and ask if we can really congratulate ourselves for "policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11."
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you name it and it would not be horrible enough for the lot of all of them.
Some of these troops will have served multiple tours of duty and spent years enduring horrors I can't even imagine. All so Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield et al could make money.
Soon, many of these brave young people will come back to us tormented by the events they've witnessed, and their reward for serving their country and bearing these scars?
Shockingly bad mental health care ... at best: fistfuls of anti-depre
The number of "fatal shooting" stories will surely increase exponentia
And NO slur on any service personnel intended here! Rather, it's the military bureaucrac
-cut $1.5 billion from military family housing
-underfund
-cut budgets and forced more than 200,000 veterans to wait for health care.
-opposed plan to give National Guard and Reserve Members access to health insurance.
-cut $172 million allotted for educating the children of military personnel.
Why should they suddenly care about our fallen soldiers?
The GOP is long on compliment
These guys would lose at RIsk. Come to think of it, they did. We did.
We are a nation of immigrants
We do not speak Russian, Chinese, Swahili, Portugese, German, or French
If you want to live here....le
Don't ever forget the men and women who died that we might enjoy the freedoms we do...
One of those freedoms being...if you don't like it here...you are free to move to another country
We are a peculiar nation...W
"In God we trust" is printed on our currency, and engraved in stone in the halls of congress..
I'll put my trust in HIM, and HIM alone....G
That is not true. It was founded on democratic principles
torture cost more American lives once the revelation
-Billy Stone
- Billy Stone
I had many uncles and cousins who fought in WW2; heroes, everyone. I worked as a nurse in a VA hospital when the men from Viet Nam began coming home; they too were heroes! I was honored to be able to help care for them...
Cheney is a COWARD ...
How about the biggest loss of all: almost 5,000 American service members killed and tens of thousands injured and disabled because of Bush's vanity war, which Cheney lied, bribed, and just plain hallucinat
And don't forget the thousands and thousands of fundamenta
Safe, I don't think so.
Whoever the people are across the country who get together to assemble care packages for the soldiers, Thank You! That does go beyond applying yellow ribbon stickers to vehicles.
It may just be me but I can't stand it when people say "Thank you for your service" in that reflexive way as if they were trained to say it in their management meetings and sales seminars. Typically I respond by saying "You don't have to thank me. I volunteere
The best parade this country can ever give its veterans, soldiers, and civilians is a parade of sober, serious, wise leaders with education, intellect, and mettle, who can guide the ship of state peacefully through the waters.
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