Memorial Day is an emotionally perplexing holiday for me. I usually cringe when I hear the rhetoric of being grateful to a soldier for the freedoms we hold so dear. While there is certainly a part of me that wishes it so, it is about the most a-historical statement one could make. I have yet to see one freedom “saved” through war.
The harsh reality, as in our current extravaganza in the middle east, is that war is too often the anti-thesis of freedom in the soldiers name. Societies do not go to war to preserve rights and freedoms, but to destroy them. The irony of this is soldiers come back from war believing this propaganda, and are aggressive in the assertion of their inalienable rights. I guess it just goes to show that government lies and in turn lies we tell ourselves are double edged swords.
I think in many ways soldiers are an exploited group. They rarely come from the classes in America that prosper and owe the most. They tend to, as Eugene Debs would argue, come from the lower class, those who have rights denied, if its in the work place, court system, or the political arena, on a daily basis. They must fight for and appropriate ideals which are not initially their own. Too often being a soldier is the class burden of fighting for the interests and rights of the privileged classes that you yourself are not privileged too.
Mother Jones had it right when she said, Honor the dead but fight like hell for the living. Post WW1 soldiers in demanding their rights as Americans gave us the march on Washington. Post WW2 soldiers gave us the GI Bill of Rights which radically transformed both college education and home ownership. Post Vietnam soldiers, especially black soldiers, demanded a level of integration they had experienced in fighting for their country but were denied upon their return.
Propaganda is funny that way, if the people believe, it may just come back to bite the money class in the ass.
If waterboarding is okay, why dont we let our police do it to suspects to learn what they know?
If waterboarding is okay, why didnt we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and [Terry] Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? Whats your answer to that? he asked. We only seem to waterboard Muslims.
They want her out because she (Pelosi) lied? asked Ventura. Why didnt they ask for Bush and Cheney to go out when they lied about why we went into Iraq.
“You Give Me a Water Board, Dick Cheney and One Hour”
After Madison increased bus fares 50 cents to $2 last month, Metro Transit is now proposing to use some of that new revenue to boost service.
Metro wants to restore Route 10, which would link the Near East Side and UW Hospital and create 15-minute service between the UW-Madison campus and the hospital.via WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL.
Screw Metro. This is class warfare at its worst. Come on, it costs over $400 a year to send 1 child to school on a bus, and that’s if you buy the passes.
Today, I find out the working poor were required to pay 50 cents more a ride to subsidize Madison’s newly emerging gentry class.
University employees and students both get their passes in bulk (at a much cheaper rate). Since the city is incapable of bartering a better deal with the university, it raises bus taxes on citizens with limited income and the worst bus service in the city.
It is one thing to have a screwed up bus system, but quite another to be forced to pay for improvements on a gentry line I’ll never use. I’ll bet you another thing, these gentrified busses are not whored like the busses that go past my house.
Liberals wonder why there is so much angst at the notion of an RTA. We get enough class warfare from Madison Metro, we certainly do not need it from a RTA.
Screw Metro, Take a Cab, now that’s a bumper stick I’d buy.
It isn't hard to pick out the Obama supporters. They're the charter-school entrepreneurs as opposed to the public-school teachers. The management consultants rather than the government lawyers. The hot-shot hedge-fund managers, not the blue-collars.
