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Support Our Troops!
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 email Michael Z.
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Once upon a time in a town between two bodies of water there was a cowboy and his posse. The cowboy's job was to take care of the town and the posse's job was to protect the town and they both, for the most part, did their job without much of the town making a big fuss about anything.
But then one day, everything changed. A bunch of thugs from the next town over came to town and blew up two windmills on main street.
Nobody could believe how it happened, or why it happened. The town was really saddened by the loss of their windmills and turned to the cowboy for guidance.
He said: "I'm going to take my posse and go fight those thugs."
And he did.
And it was good.
But as he was fighting those thugs, he got the idea. Why stop at one town? Why don't we fight the thugs in the next town over?
So he wrangled up his posse and said: "We're going to fight those thugs too."
But the people of his town, were asking: "What did those thugs ever do to us?"
And the cowboy said: "If we don't get them first, they'll get us."
While the people were confused, the posse was upset. The job they had signed up for was to protect the town, not to become thugs themselves.
They didn't see how attacking a town that had nothing to do with them was going to make their town a better place.
But the cowboy insisted. He said that the people of that other town didn't like their cowboy. He was a "bad guy". So it was their job to go after that bad guy.
The people were confused even more. They said that there were lots of towns that had bad guys. There were lots of people suffering.
In fact, there was a town where people were being killed just for the color of their skin. That town was full of "bad guys", not just one. If the cowboy wanted to make the world a better place, that seemed like the logical town to start with.
The cowboy didn't think so. He wrangled up his posse without the people of the town giving their OK, and sent them into the town with the bad guy and said they were going to get them.
"Don't worry," he told his posse, "after we take out the bad guy, everyone is going to love us. It'll be great."
But it wasn't great. Taking out the bad guy was easy enough, but the people of that town weren't too happy to see the posse sticking around.
"Thank you," they said, "now leave. This is our town and we'll take care of it."
The cowboy didn't agree. He said that without his posse, that the town would fall apart all over again. The posse was the only thing keeping any sense of order there. The posse was preventing anarchy.
Back at home, the people were growing restless with what the posse was up to. The people needed doctors and teachers and cleanliness, but the posse was using up all the money.
The people were suffering. Worse, they were wondering why they had to suffer.
When they started looking into what was happening in the town, they noticed that all of the cowboy's friends were working in the town. He had hired them to clean up the mess he had created.
It was a nice little racket: Cowboy destroys building, then hires his friends, using the people's money, to build a new building.
In a sense, he was mugging his entire town and giving their goods to all his friends.
What a bastard.
Well, when the posse realized what was going on they weren't too happy about it either. Here they were, in a posse to protect their town, and they had been turned into a bunch of thugs themselves.
They didn't like this idea.
They had trusted the cowboy, but the cowboy had betrayed them.
They were really angry. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do about it. The cowboy was still in charge and he was telling the posse, you've got to stick around.
And not only that, he was making plans to send even more of the posse over there.
But the people had heard enough.
The Voice of the Troops
On my way through Times Square I came across a protest being held at the recruiting center made famous in the wake of Pearl Harbor. On one side citizens waved large signs that read: "Support Our Troops--Send Them Home!"
On the other side, because this is still America, after all, and if you have the freedom to assemble, that means people who disagree with you have the freedom to assemble also, were carrying signs: "Protest the War=Disgracing Our Troops"
I'm here to argue that by not protesting the mess that is now the entering the fourth year of the Iraq War, that you are disgracing our troops.
That to not protest the current state of affairs is to be as phony as African uranium cake.
The American soldier's mission is to do what is best for America.
It is not his or her mission to do what is best for the president's ego.
Right now, soldiers are dying every day because the president betrayed their trust and sent them to fight a war based in selfish reasons.
If the president had actually sent them there for the sake of democracy, I would be for the war, in the same sense that I am for sending troops to Darfur to end the genocide.
But he didn't. He sent them to die for no good reason.
Because there are good reasons to die, in the Martin Luther King, Jr., sense that if you don't have anything worth dying for, then you don't have anything worth living for.
We have sent men to die for land and for democracy, and it seems just a good a reason as any other to send men (and women this time), to die for peace.
So now that our soldiers are dying because the president is a selfish bastard, it's about time we listened to our troops and spoke up.
It's just simple physics: If you're in Iraq, then you can't be protesting in New York.
Somebody has to do it for you and I salute the people who do, and I say to the people that were against the protest that YOU ARE disgracing the troops because you refuse to listen to them, you refuse to take care of them, you refuse to honor them for what they've had to give up.
I Support Our Troops by saying: "God damn it, they're dying for no reason, we've got to clean up this mess and get them out of there." |
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