thenewrepublic:How America lost touch with the military.During nearly every major-league baseball ga
thenewrepublic:How America lost touch with the military.During nearly every major-league baseball game I have attended over the past few years, the P.A. announcer invites men and women in the military to stand up and then asks the rest of us to “honor their service” and their “heroism.” Most of the civilians in the crowd rise to their feet and applaud loudly. I manage to keep my cynicism to myself.My problem is not with the young people who get to spend a few hours away from their jobs protecting the United States from its enemies—real, potential, or imagined. It’s the unwitting hypocrisy of my fellow fans that ticks me off. So many of them happily cheer the members of our all-volunteer force while passively opposing the wars that, for over a decade, they and their fellow troops have been fighting. It would be far better for Americans to finally face up to that contradiction.Michael Kazin — “‘Supporting Our Troops’ Has Become an Exercise in Denial”The ritualistic, if nearly content-free, applause for the troops is not hard to understand. After four decades of a volunteer military, few Americans, young and old, share the experiences of those who do sign up. There is also an enduring sense of guilt over how the veterans of the Vietnam War were treated on their staggered return home, although the great majority were ignored or pitied rather than vilified, as legend would have it. Warm memories of the combative solidarity Americans expressed during the months just after the attacks of 9/11 linger as well; in ballparks across the land, “God Bless America” still gets sung or at least hummed during the 7th inning stretch.However, these explanations shade into excuses for a species of civic amorality which is unprecedented in U.S. history. From the Civil War through both world wars, Americans saluted the troops because they appreciated and endorsed the causes for which they were fighting. The angry, sometimes violent debate at home about the wars in Indochina at least confronted the justice of what individual soldiers were doing over there. But we now applaud our servicemen and women as “heroes” while neglecting the policies that have, since 2001, required them, quite literally, to put their lives on the line. Perhaps it would be more honest just to buy them a beer and a hotdog and then go back to watching the damn game. -- source link
#politics#war policy#apathy