Peace?

   

   When I was at war, I was young and stupid. I was 17. I thought, I actually thought, that rebelling against all things was my right of passage. All teenagers go through that. When I came back from war, I watched those that I left behind die. They died from apathy and childish rebellion. When I came back I saw the 'PEACE MOVEMENT' for it was ... a bunch of of chicken shit, upper class, too-busy-with-their-own-lives-to-be-bothered-to-fight for this country assholes. Simple as that.

   I look back on those days with a great sadness. See ... to posture thus is to give comfort to the enemy. Simple as that.

   We DO have an enemy you know. It is Islamic extremism. They have proven themselves worthy of that appelation ... ENEMY. They will kill. They will kill without mercy. They will kill for the cameras. They will kill YOU if they can.

   They may be your next door neighbor. They might be in your class at school. Their kids may play soccer on the same team. They are driven by a religious zeal you will never understand.

   Understand this, this is war. All the hand wringing and 'protests' will only serve to further their ability to kill YOU.

                                       That is what they want to do.

          I am sorry for pretending long ago that 'PEACE' was an option. It's not.

                                       Not when you are at war.

Comments

[Phoenix]

I wonder what goes through the mind of a pacifist. That it is okay, fine and dandy to let people under a dictator or despot to suffer? A pacifist, one who claims 'violence' to be the root of all evil, is one who actually promulgates evil by refusing to fight it. How noble is their mindset: We refuse to fight. Meanwhile, people not in a position to fight, die - all over the world. Islamofacists are a dangerous force: Pacifists are more dangerous.

[Mouse]

It seems to me that most every war stems from some kind of religious incompatibility coupled with greed. We want your land, we want your oil, we want you to think and act like us! But you are right that this is indeed different. They are zealots who are simply filled with a love for a very rich Usama who appears to have done a Siddartha type thing. I say appears because I don't believe he is really living in anything close to poverty. They are lambs being led to the slaughter while Usama revels in the power he wields. We need to find that man, and still, when we do, it will take a long time for the fervor to subside. By the way, I may be a bleeding heart liberal but I am not a Pacifist. There are plenty of times when I wish we could just lock certain people up and throw away the key.

[Mouse]

Steel, I've got to add that my husband got out of the service in 1968 after 8 years of duty. He was so disgusted with the attitudes of the "peaceniks" toward the military that he went to Canada. That is where we hooked up:) It was generally assumed by most everyone that he had to be a draft dodger. They all went to Canada:)

[Steel]

When I came back from Vietnam I grew my hair and hung out with 'hippies'. I never subscribed to their pacifism though. Still don't. Kill 'em and let their Gods sort it out.

[Phoenix]

During the summer of '68 I lived in Richmond, VA. I was in college in SC but home for the summer. I met and dated a guy, a Lt. in the 82nd Airborne. I remember him showing me how to land from parachuting by jumping off tree limbs in my backyard in the wee hours of the morning. I dated him on weekends. During the week, I dated a guy named Paul who had long dark hair and a long beard. Bright guy who I loved to be with. At the end of the summer, I asked him why we never went out on weekends. He admitted that on weekends he drove draft-dodgers to Canada. My Lieutenant shipped out to Germany for training before heading off to Vietnam. I visited him in Germany and spent three weeks traveling all over Europe. During that following year in college I sent tape cassettes to him, and he wrote back frequently to keep sending more because his 'guys' loved to hear the laughter of me and my roommates all yakking on the tapes. He made it Captain and eventually settled in Atlanta. I don't know what happened to Paul. What I do know is that my father, a retired Colonel in the Army, only knew about the Airborne guy. I used to meet Paul so my father wouldn't see him. How odd, looking back on that summer, that I so cluelessly engaged my time with two young men so diametrically opposed to certain values.

[enantiodromia]

I know it feels good for you to think we are helping civilians under the rule of a ruthless dictator, and that the US is somehow undertaking a humanitarian effort in Iraq. And maybe some of that is true.

But if that is your main reason for supporting the war in Iraq, then I wonder how you feel about allowing MILLIONS of other people in the world who are under the exact same type of dictatorship, who are tortured and killed just as much, or more, than any Iraqi under Saddam.

It's a bit short sighted to be so gung-ho about Iraq for humanitarian reasons when there are plenty of other areas where the people are worse off.

Claiming Pacifism is more dangerous than a twisted version of a religion which rationalizes the mass murder of as many people as you have the opportunity to kill, is a bit insane. Are you trying to imply that Gandhi was more dangerous than Hitler? Or that MLK Jr. was more a threat to peace than the KKK?

Many of you here are taking extremely convenient views of the world.

To say the "peace movement" is/was a bunch of "chicken shit assholes" who were too wrapped up in their own lives to help others is extremely ignorant.

Does this take into account people who have come back from war, who were obviously not chicken-shit in the first place, who have decided that war is often NOT the answer, who have gone on to join the peace movement?

Does this take into consideration those people who did not choose to join the military, but instead went to college, earned advanced degrees, and went on to develop new medicines, civil engineering, economic models and food production techniques designed specifically to set up these countries you are so proud to have helped liberate?

Who has helped humanity more: 1,000 dead soldiers, or one living scientist who has tripled the amount of wheat an acre of land can produce in harsh environments?

There mere fact you are reading this post, on your computer, on the Internet, over Cisco routers, using UNIX web and DNS servers, using HTML, on your Intel or AMD processor, implies that you are deeply immersed in what those damned bay area pacifists have been working on for the last few decades.

The Left needs the Right to keep the assholes from nuking the USA.

The Right needs the Left to innovate and create the new technologies used to defend ourselves, keep the population entertained, and advance our overall quality of living.

To think that one side can do without the other is EXACTLY the problem here.

That's called Extremism, which I thouht was what we were supposed to be fighting.