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• Tuesday, September 19, 2006 10:49 AM

  Courage

  "It only just occurred to me that you seem to assume that when people "learn" that soldiers actually die in combat (gasp! who knew?), they will lose any and all interest in the service. Maybe I'm being idealistic, but I'd like to think that America's youth is slightly more courageous than that."

  Thirty years ago, a sentiment like this would have seemed very strange coming out of the 'mouth' of any but the most conservative of college-age kids. The post-1980 American lurch rightward is more astonishing to me than anything Bush himself (who is hardly a man of paradoxes) has come up with. Long after he's gone, we'll still be dealing with the fact that the two-party system in our country is a dialog now between the right and the ultra-right. Any person or concept that might legitimately be called 'Left' is written off as wacko, stupid, or just too weak to live.

  Chloe, let me open your eyes to the wisdom that signing up for the 'service' is not nearly as courageous an act as speaking out loudly against it. Young people risking serious injury or death (and risking inflicting the same on innocents) in order to serve a shadowy cabal's global agenda is an awful thing. Just as so many women are now complicit in their own oppression, so it seems with the young, who are perhaps too hypnotized by the over-abundance of consumer choices, and the pressures implicit in the drive to earn enough money to make these choices, to think too deeply about philosophical questions of independent-vs-herd thinking. You rightly admire your friends and relatives for doing what they think is right, Chloe, but ask yourself: why do they think signing up for this war (these wars)is right? Does it really make sense? Why is their government so willing to risk their lives in a death-trap on the other side of the world and to what end?

  These questions are not asked often enough, loudly enough, by enough 'normal' people.

  —Anna Ominous
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