Support Our Troops

The goal of the established is to present a skewed view of the world. There's us here in our little country and we are all happy and together and united etc. And then there's them, the dirty other people that don't belong with us, that are somehow always lurking out on the periphery trying to kill us; conveniently around election seasons no less (communists, terrorists, socialists, mexicans etc).

Governments and businesses have been propagating this idea since the dawn of nation states (approximately 1648). It happened in the late Weimar Republic, it happened in Soviet Russia, it happened in Maoist China, it happened in King George's England, it happened in Franco's Spain, and Polpot's Cambodia, Suharto's Indonesia, Sharon's Israel, Bonaparte's France, Mussolini's Italy, and it happens today in America.

With phrases like "support our troops", (incedentally something that no one is allowed to even fathom questioning) the goal is to create a culture without thinking.

Well, yeah I support our troops. That's a good thing. Right? Or is it?

One is not even granted the ability to question what it is our troops are doing. Let's say our troops invaded a country that had posed no threat of attack to the U.S. and let's say that country did absolutely nothing to harm the United States in any way (take say Iraq and Afghanistan for starters). And let's say our troops are killing civilians, bombing churches, mosques, schools, and hospitals- all in the name of freedom and democracy. Would you support our troops then?

Let's say veteran complaints of terrible health care, or no access at all, have been extremely high in recent years according to escalating rates of PTSD and declining rates of health care access for veterans. Does it even seem that national leaders "support our troops"?

Is it right to support our troops when they are needlessly killing people? How many goddamn innocent civilians have to lose their lives and the ones they love before we stop worshipping our troops and start giving the peace movement some hearsay? With all the money we spend on "national security" (in other words militarizing the world) we could be feeding starving Ethiopian children or building humanitarian shelters in Bolivia.

Does anyone support this?

This is the kind of stuff that is happening in our world today. The true people that actually support our troops as human beings, discourage their status as troops. We must reject outward aggressive war at all cost, or accept the future consequences of our actions. Today we are killing them, tomorrow they may retaliate against us. It is an endless cycle that can end with us if we want it to.