Sunday, August 21, 2005
More memos missed
I shall not sell my slaves to you, says one set of parents, who I'll gratuitously name so they can be proud of their slaver ideals: Patricia A. Levesh and Michael Raabe. Which is funny, since I was under the impression we didn't have slavery here.
We are the parents of two teenaged sons entering junior year in high school. We will not send them to die for what we believe is an unnecessary and unjust war about which our government has lied to us.
My parents remember the day that they chose not to sign off on the contract that would send me to the military. Other parents do sign, though, sending their kids off to die in a war that, presumably, those parents approve of.
Oh, wait a second. Parents don't own their children in the 21st century. I guess it's telling that the "progressives" on the anti-war side continue to live in the outdated Dark Ages they accuse Bush and "the Christian fundamentalists" of sending us back to, apparently through their complete lack of impact on the law.
No, we live in a world where you can't be sent to war on your parents' whim. Absent a draft, the decision actually falls to the person being sent to war. I realize these are groundbreaking ideas that anti-war folks are unfamiliar with, but hopefully they can understand.
Ellen Goodman puts it another way:
It's a shorthand that both grants and diminishes her authority to speak out against the war, a moral authority won the hardest way possible, through the loss of her child.
That's right, you win moral authority if someone else gets killed. I dunno how that works, but I guess you can take it up with the scorekeepers. Oh, by the way, if you're still for the war after your kid gets killed, you don't win any moral authority.
(Remember, after this war, you can cash in any unused moral authority for plastic combs and the like)
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