It’s nearly 4:00 PM. My cigar’s lit and scotch poured as we enter this long weekend honoring those who fell in so many wars.
It would be easy to launch into a discussion about war: Just or Unjust. However, those far more intelligent than I have done that with considerably more eloquence than I.
The problem for me is that we haven’t learned: We’re still doing it – not only here in the U.S., but around the world. I don’t know if a line about Kent State does anything here to add, but it occurs to me that there’s reason for it.
Just days more than four decades ago Ohio National Guardsman fired into a crowd of Kent State University students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia – they killed four students and wounded nearly a dozen others.
There was a “Draft” back then. You’re number came up and you went, unless, of course you had the fortitude to take off to Canada.
There is no “Draft” now. We have two wars in progress, yet our college students don’t really seem to give a damn: They’re safe as we have an all volunteer military.
It almost seems as if they don’t realize that our nation, more than three centuries old and we’ve not yet learned about war. Let’s take I and II out of it. Well, we can take all those that have gone before out.
Okay, I’m not certain where I’m going with this, but I read yesterday that we just hit 1,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Afghanistan.
I’ve got a grandchild and another on the way. I’ve been around the block with protests, and I’ve seen war (covered Vietnam for nearly a year). I rather they grow up thinking about “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” than a war.
When does it end?
