Several thoughts and feelings surface reading this thread. Many of them remind me of the thoughts and feelings originally inspired before I joined these forums.
I'm just gonna go 'stream of consciousness' here ...
Oscar wrote:
If the police did strike, would we really miss them?
Only when you 'really' needed them. I am accustomed to hearing in my mind, the motto, "to serve and protect", but the vast majority of my interactions with them occur in speedtraps ... which means the vast majority of the time, no, I wouldn't miss them. If there never is a cop around when you really need them, then, as a general rule, most of us, most of the time, wouldn't miss them.
They exist because we'd rather let someone else protect us, than do it ourselves.
Excuse the grammatical error, but 'us' created 'them'. Keep that in mind when those whom 'we' have 'consented' to 'protect us' do more and more things that 'we' wouldn't miss.
Who
would miss them?
SafeSpeed wrote:
Outcast wrote:
How much support do people think the under equipped & underpaid soldiers who were sent to a streetwar we had no business being in will give to our government ?
To the Squaddies reading this...
I support you 100%
Not the reasons you were sent there though.
This is a difficult area for me personally. I have a hard time supporting (in spirit) soldiers who went into a war that every thinking person knew was illegitimate. Yet I want to be able to support those who 'fight for our country'.
Should I be happy that our soldiers were perhaps 'unthinking'?
Does anyone want to help me unravel these moral questions?
As a former U.S. Marine, it significantly raises my blood pressure, not to answer this question ...
At some point, Amerikans who do not support the W. Bush regime's military actions are asked, "but do you support the troops?"
Answering yes is wrong, because the question itself is a relatively rare red herring.
If your son/daughter was on either side of a gunfight between the Crips and the Bloods, you'd already be assured that they were there for the wrong reasons, so you wouldn't support the cause. You also wouldn't start throwing them additional ammo and armor, either - except perhaps under the following condition - they extricate themselves from the battleground, which is what you really want for them.
Whenever asked if I support the troops, I'd say I want as many of them to come home safe and sound as possible, and I will hold responsible all those who prevent and delay their safe and speedy return from a military campaign that is saturated with lies of omission and commission from those who truly do not support them - the Amerikan government.
Rigpig wasn't confrontational, at least not with *Sir* Paul Smith. The nobility of the armed forces' sacrifices are ... overshadowed ... by the reasons they were sent, and those that sent them, neither support them, nor respect them, nor can conceive of nobility, except as an entitlement to treat others as resources.
Most people choose not to consider the possibility that, "If the armed forces were given the remit to do similar for every scenario they found themselves in", and the vast majority of the armed forces - which, by extension, means the vast majority of the public - were as smart and as convicted as the late *Sir* Paul Smith, most orders rooted in megalomania would be checked, many before they were even uttered. I know I sound like an idealist when I say that the only things likely to get done would be those orders which would serve the good of the greatest number of people, but who profited from the skyrocketing prices of oil? Who quietly consented?
Can you picture a world where the kind of bu11$h!t that came out of George Dubya Bush's mouth during his reign would never be tolerated, or condoned, or even excused?