Let's have some truth and it will set you free
America, the light of the free market world supported by corporate welfare, citadel of freedom where freedom is locked up right now, exemplar of excessive consumption and not of the the tubercular kind--Let's have some truth and it will set you free.
Normal people of the USA don't want their military personnel killed and most who join the military are not expecting to actually go to war.
The military career, either the full service kind or the limited National Guard genre, is frequently seen as the security needed for health benefits, education, and pensions that will be required in a person's life.
Funny though that people entering a life-threatening occupation should think too much about the future as the Bu$h Junta cuts military benefits while extolling the blood-letting catharsis of active killing and maiming directed at foreigners.
However, with a jingoist Junta in charge of the USA we're cheerleader-ed and inflamed to support the troops because the Junta knows that should we fully understand that the reasons for the involvement of the military in a foreign civil war being bogus, our willingness to let our military personnel be feed into the threshing machine of death and war profiteering would be at an end.
Few people will admit that American military personnel are dying in vain.
To admit that thousands are dead, and tens of thousands are maimed physically and mentally for the rest of their lives, is too damaging to the nation's collective psyche to admit in the light of sober and reasoned discussion.
Therefore, our puppet masters pull our emotional strings at every opportunity. Who is the more responsible: those who insist on an open ended war or those wanting killing to stop?
That's why I feel the most rational action any authentic American can perform is to work peacefully for the removal of American troops from foreign civil and religious wars.
In addition to direct resistance to this Junta's war, voting for candidates who do not equivocate about the senselessness of war fighting is the best example in the custom of our limited democracy that we can perform.
Truth need not require threats to life and limb but it does require the moral engagement of the mind.