Memorial Day

I hate writing about this. Depending on what crap I've read from various MSM sources and what I've seen on various blogs, I get either really, really pissed off or teared up(guess which causes which?). I've written before about my great uncles who served in WWII. I've had friends in military service, and some of the officers who ran my son's Civil Air Patrol unit went repeatedly to the Balkans and the sandbox. Makes me feel useless for not being able to go and do something. So, partly as reaction, I rail and piss and moan about the crap on the news and idiotic statements from Amnesty International and really stupid comments from places like Democratic Underground. I simply cannot understand how people who depend on the freedom of this society to speak and write and dress and read as they please can take every opportunity to crap on the people in uniform. It ticks me off, and makes me despair.

The people in academy who look down on the armed forces? Piss on them. A couple of years ago a college professor wrote of the reactionss when it became known that his son had joined the Marines; the local citazens looked on him as the parent of another man in uniform, while the 'elites' at the university and local upper classes wanted to know 'what went wrong' to make a boy from a 'good family' do something so improper. He wrote of the difficulty he had dealing with this nonsense, and it's still going on.

Despite the crap, there are still lots- I think most- who both support the troops, and for that matter would take up arms to act in defense of this country. Note that I say 'this country'; not a particular place in it, but this Country. I think that's where the big difference is coming from. A lot of the 'elites' think that this is a bad, or 'uneducated' view from people who don't know better, whereas those who would do it consider the 'elites' to be overeducated fools who've stopped listening to/paying attention to anyone not of their 'class'. And it IS a class problem, though not the usual one of who has money. It's a big problem, and it'll probably get worse before it gets better, and God knows what'll happen in the process. Howard Veit wrote here about the situation in Singapore with the British Army, and what class disdain/hatred did to them. Happily, though there seems to be a lot of 'class' crap from some Naval Academy and West Point grads toward the troops, it's nothing like the crap that happened there. And it's one of our strong points. I think that, in the end, we'll get through this, but I don't know how bad it'll get.

And we'll owe a lot to those in uniform who maintain their oath the Constitution.