12-15 minutes
“We’re at war while America is at the mall.”
I’m not sure when I first heard this in Iraq, but even back in 2007 it was already a well-worn phrase, the logical counterpart to George W. Bush’s arguing after the Sept. 11 attacks that we must not let the terrorists frighten us to the point “where people don’t shop.”
Marines had probably started saying it as early as 2002. “We’re at war while America is at the mall,” some lance corporal muttered to another as they shivered against the winds rushing down the valleys in the Hindu Kush. “We’re at war while America is at the mall,” some prematurely embittered lieutenant told his platoon sergeant as they drove up to Nasiriyah in a light armored vehicle.
Whatever the case, when I heard it, it sounded right. Just enough truth mixed with self-aggrandizement to appeal to a man in his early 20s. Back home was shopping malls and strip clubs. Over here was death and violence and hope and despair. Back home was fast food and high-fructose corn syrup. Over here, we had bodies flooding the rivers of Iraq until people claimed it changed the taste of the fish. Back home they had aisles filled wall to wall with toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant and body spray. Over here, sweating under the desert sun, we smelled terrible. We were at war, they were at the mall.
The old phrase popped back into my head recently while I was shopping for baby onesies on Long Island — specifically, in the discount section on the second floor of the Buy Buy Baby. Yes, I was at the mall, and America was still at war.
I’m not sure when I first heard this in Iraq, but even back in 2007 it was already a well-worn phrase, the logical counterpart to George W. Bush’s arguing after the Sept. 11 attacks that we must not let the terrorists frighten us to the point “where people don’t shop.”
Marines had probably started saying it as early as 2002. “We’re at war while America is at the mall,” some lance corporal muttered to another as they shivered against the winds rushing down the valleys in the Hindu Kush. “We’re at war while America is at the mall,” some prematurely embittered lieutenant told his platoon sergeant as they drove up to Nasiriyah in a light armored vehicle.
Whatever the case, when I heard it, it sounded right. Just enough truth mixed with self-aggrandizement to appeal to a man in his early 20s. Back home was shopping malls and strip clubs. Over here was death and violence and hope and despair. Back home was fast food and high-fructose corn syrup. Over here, we had bodies flooding the rivers of Iraq until people claimed it changed the taste of the fish. Back home they had aisles filled wall to wall with toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant and body spray. Over here, sweating under the desert sun, we smelled terrible. We were at war, they were at the mall.
The old phrase popped back into my head recently while I was shopping for baby onesies on Long Island — specifically, in the discount section on the second floor of the Buy Buy Baby. Yes, I was at the mall, and America was still at war.
There’s something bizarre about being a veteran of a war that doesn’t end, in a country that doesn’t pay attention. At this point, I’ve been out of the military far longer than I was in, and the weight I place on the value of military life versus civilian life has shifted radically. On the one hand, I haven’t lost my certainty that Americans should be paying more attention to our wars and that our lack of attention truly does cost lives.
“We’ve claimed war-weariness, or ‘America First,’ and turned a blind eye to the slaughter of 500,000 people and suffering of millions more,” the former Marine Mackenzie Wolf pointed out in a March essay on America’s unconscionable lack of action in Syria up to that point. On the other hand, I’m increasingly convinced that my youthful contempt for the civilians back home was not just misplaced, but obscene and, frankly, part of the problem.
After four United States soldiers assigned to the Army’s Third Special Forces Group were killed in an ambush in Niger, the American public had a lot of questions. Why were they in combat in Niger? What was their mission? How do you pronounce “Niger”? Answering these questions would have required a complex, sustained discussion about how America projects force around the world, about expanding the use of Special Operations forces to 149 countries, and about whether we are providing those troops with well-thought-out missions and the resources to achieve them in the service of a sound and worthwhile national security strategy.
And since our troops were in Niger in a continuation of an Obama administration policy that began in 2013, it also would have meant discussing the way that administration ramped up “supervise, train and assist” missions in Africa, how it often tried to blur the line between advisory and combat missions to avoid public scrutiny, and how the Trump administration appears to have followed in those footsteps. It would have required, at a bare minimum, not using the deaths as material for neat, partisan parables.
“We’ve claimed war-weariness, or ‘America First,’ and turned a blind eye to the slaughter of 500,000 people and suffering of millions more,” the former Marine Mackenzie Wolf pointed out in a March essay on America’s unconscionable lack of action in Syria up to that point. On the other hand, I’m increasingly convinced that my youthful contempt for the civilians back home was not just misplaced, but obscene and, frankly, part of the problem.
After four United States soldiers assigned to the Army’s Third Special Forces Group were killed in an ambush in Niger, the American public had a lot of questions. Why were they in combat in Niger? What was their mission? How do you pronounce “Niger”? Answering these questions would have required a complex, sustained discussion about how America projects force around the world, about expanding the use of Special Operations forces to 149 countries, and about whether we are providing those troops with well-thought-out missions and the resources to achieve them in the service of a sound and worthwhile national security strategy.
And since our troops were in Niger in a continuation of an Obama administration policy that began in 2013, it also would have meant discussing the way that administration ramped up “supervise, train and assist” missions in Africa, how it often tried to blur the line between advisory and combat missions to avoid public scrutiny, and how the Trump administration appears to have followed in those footsteps. It would have required, at a bare minimum, not using the deaths as material for neat, partisan parables.
Naturally, we didn’t have that conversation. Instead, a Democratic congresswoman who heard the president’s phone call to the widow of one of the fallen soldiers informed the news media that Mr. Trump had ineptly told the grieving woman that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”
Quickly, Americans shifted from a discussion of policy to a symbolic battle over which side, Democratic or Republican, wasn’t respecting soldiers enough. Had the president disrespected the troops with his comment? Had Democrats disrespected the troops by trying to use a condolence call for political leverage? Someone clearly had run afoul of an odd form of political correctness, “patriotic correctness.”
Since, as recent history has shown us, violating the rules of patriotic correctness is a far worse sin in the eyes of the American public than sending soldiers to die uselessly, the political battle became intense, and the White House was forced to respond. And since in a symbolic debate of this kind nothing is better than an old soldier, the retired Marine general and current chief of staff, John Kelly, was trotted out in an Oct. 19 news conference to defend the president.
He began powerfully enough, describing what happens to the bodies of soldiers killed overseas, and bringing up his own still painful memories of the loss of his son, who died in Afghanistan in 2010. He spoke with pride of the men and women in uniform.
But then, in an all too common move, he transitioned to expressing contempt for the civilian world. He complained that nothing seemed to be sacred in America anymore, not women, not religion, not even “the dignity of life.” He told the audience that service members volunteer even though “there’s nothing in our country anymore that seems to suggest that selfless service to the nation is not only appropriate, but required.” He said veterans feel “a little bit sorry” for civilians who don’t know the joys of service.
To cap things off, he took questions only from reporters who knew families who had lost loved ones overseas. The rest of the journalists, and by extension the rest of the American public who don’t know any Gold Star families, were effectively told they had no place in the debate.
Such disdain for those who haven’t served and yet dare to have opinions about military matters is nothing new for Mr. Kelly. In a 2010 speech after the death of his son, Mr. Kelly improbably claimed that we were winning in Afghanistan, but that “you wouldn’t know it because successes go unreported” by members of the “‘know it all’ chattering class” who “always seem to know better, but have never themselves been in the arena.” And he argued that to oppose the war, which our current secretary of defense last year testified to Congress we were not winning, meant “slighting our warriors and mocking their commitment to the nation.”
This is a common attitude among a significant faction of veterans. As one former member of the Special Forces put it in a social media post responding to the liberal outcry over the deaths in Niger, “We did what we did so that you can be free to naïvely judge us, complain about the manner in which we kept you safe” and “just all around live your worthless sponge lives.” His commentary, which was liked and shared thousands of times, is just a more embittered form of the sentiment I indulged in as a young lieutenant in Iraq.
Since, as recent history has shown us, violating the rules of patriotic correctness is a far worse sin in the eyes of the American public than sending soldiers to die uselessly, the political battle became intense, and the White House was forced to respond. And since in a symbolic debate of this kind nothing is better than an old soldier, the retired Marine general and current chief of staff, John Kelly, was trotted out in an Oct. 19 news conference to defend the president.
He began powerfully enough, describing what happens to the bodies of soldiers killed overseas, and bringing up his own still painful memories of the loss of his son, who died in Afghanistan in 2010. He spoke with pride of the men and women in uniform.
But then, in an all too common move, he transitioned to expressing contempt for the civilian world. He complained that nothing seemed to be sacred in America anymore, not women, not religion, not even “the dignity of life.” He told the audience that service members volunteer even though “there’s nothing in our country anymore that seems to suggest that selfless service to the nation is not only appropriate, but required.” He said veterans feel “a little bit sorry” for civilians who don’t know the joys of service.
To cap things off, he took questions only from reporters who knew families who had lost loved ones overseas. The rest of the journalists, and by extension the rest of the American public who don’t know any Gold Star families, were effectively told they had no place in the debate.
Such disdain for those who haven’t served and yet dare to have opinions about military matters is nothing new for Mr. Kelly. In a 2010 speech after the death of his son, Mr. Kelly improbably claimed that we were winning in Afghanistan, but that “you wouldn’t know it because successes go unreported” by members of the “‘know it all’ chattering class” who “always seem to know better, but have never themselves been in the arena.” And he argued that to oppose the war, which our current secretary of defense last year testified to Congress we were not winning, meant “slighting our warriors and mocking their commitment to the nation.”
This is a common attitude among a significant faction of veterans. As one former member of the Special Forces put it in a social media post responding to the liberal outcry over the deaths in Niger, “We did what we did so that you can be free to naïvely judge us, complain about the manner in which we kept you safe” and “just all around live your worthless sponge lives.” His commentary, which was liked and shared thousands of times, is just a more embittered form of the sentiment I indulged in as a young lieutenant in Iraq.
It can be comforting to reverse the feelings of hopelessness and futility that come with fighting seemingly interminable, strategically dubious wars by enforcing a hierarchy of citizenship that puts the veteran and those close to him on top, and everyone else far, far below.
But John Kelly’s contempt for modern civilian life wasn’t a pep talk voiced in a Humvee traveling down an Iraqi highway, or at a veterans’ reunion in a local bar. He was speaking to the American people, with the authority of a retired general, on behalf of the president of the United States of America. And he was letting us know our place.
Those with questions about military policy are being put in their place more and more often these days. When reporters later asked the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, about some of Mr. Kelly’s claims, which had proved false, she said, “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that’s highly inappropriate.” It was an echo of the way Sean Spicer tried to short-circuit debate about the death of a Navy SEAL in Yemen by claiming that anyone who questioned the success of the raid “owes an apology” to the fallen SEAL.
Serious discussion of foreign policy and the military’s role within it is often prohibited by this patriotic correctness. Yet, if I have authority to speak about our military policy it’s because I’m a citizen responsible for participating in self-governance, not because I belonged to a warrior caste.
If what I say deserves to be taken seriously, it’s because I’ve taken the time out of my worthless sponge life as a concerned American civilian to form a worthy opinion. Which means that although it is my patriotic duty to afford men like John Kelly respect for his service, and for the grief he has endured as the father of a son who died for our country, that is not where my responsibility as a citizen ends.
I must also assume that our military policy is of direct concern to me, personally. And if a military man tries to leverage the authority and respect he is afforded to voice contempt for a vast majority of Americans, if he tries to stifle their exercise of self-governance by telling them that to question the military strategy of our generals and our political leaders is a slight to our troops, it’s my patriotic duty to tell him to go pound sand.
If we don’t do this, we risk our country slipping further into the practice of a fraudulent form of American patriotism, where “soldiers” are sacred, the work of actual soldiering is ignored and the pageantry of military worship sucks energy away from the obligations of citizenship.
But John Kelly’s contempt for modern civilian life wasn’t a pep talk voiced in a Humvee traveling down an Iraqi highway, or at a veterans’ reunion in a local bar. He was speaking to the American people, with the authority of a retired general, on behalf of the president of the United States of America. And he was letting us know our place.
Those with questions about military policy are being put in their place more and more often these days. When reporters later asked the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, about some of Mr. Kelly’s claims, which had proved false, she said, “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that’s highly inappropriate.” It was an echo of the way Sean Spicer tried to short-circuit debate about the death of a Navy SEAL in Yemen by claiming that anyone who questioned the success of the raid “owes an apology” to the fallen SEAL.
Serious discussion of foreign policy and the military’s role within it is often prohibited by this patriotic correctness. Yet, if I have authority to speak about our military policy it’s because I’m a citizen responsible for participating in self-governance, not because I belonged to a warrior caste.
If what I say deserves to be taken seriously, it’s because I’ve taken the time out of my worthless sponge life as a concerned American civilian to form a worthy opinion. Which means that although it is my patriotic duty to afford men like John Kelly respect for his service, and for the grief he has endured as the father of a son who died for our country, that is not where my responsibility as a citizen ends.
I must also assume that our military policy is of direct concern to me, personally. And if a military man tries to leverage the authority and respect he is afforded to voice contempt for a vast majority of Americans, if he tries to stifle their exercise of self-governance by telling them that to question the military strategy of our generals and our political leaders is a slight to our troops, it’s my patriotic duty to tell him to go pound sand.
If we don’t do this, we risk our country slipping further into the practice of a fraudulent form of American patriotism, where “soldiers” are sacred, the work of actual soldiering is ignored and the pageantry of military worship sucks energy away from the obligations of citizenship.
I understand why politicians and writers and institutions choose to employ the trope of veterans when it comes to arguing for their causes. Support for our military remains high at a time when respect for almost every other institution is perilously low, so pushing a military angle as a wedge makes a certain kind of sense. But our peacetime institutions are not justified by how they intermittently intersect with national security concerns — it’s the other way around. Our military is justified only by the civic life and values it exists to defend. This is why George Washington, in his Farewell Orders to the Continental Army, told his troops to “carry with them into civil society the most conciliating dispositions” and “prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as citizens than they have been persevering and victorious as soldiers.”
Besides, let’s not pretend that living a civilian life — and living it well — isn’t hard. A friend of mine, an officer in the Army Reserves, told me that one of his greatest leadership challenges came not overseas, but when a deployment to Afghanistan got canceled and his men were called to the difficult and often tedious work of being husbands, fathers, members of a community.
My wife and I are raising two sons — the older one is 2 years old, the little one 6 months. And as we follow our national politics with occasional disgust, amusement, horror and hope, we regularly talk about the sort of qualities we want to impress upon our boys so they can be good citizens, and how we can help cultivate in them a sense of service, of gratitude for the blessings they have, and a desire to give back. It’s a daunting responsibility. Right now, though, the day-to-day work of raising these kids doesn’t involve a lot of lofty rhetoric about service. It involves drool, diapers and doing the laundry. For me, it means being that most remarkable, and somehow most unremarkable of things — a dad.
Which is how I found myself that day, less a Marine veteran than a father, shopping with the other parents at Buy Buy Baby, recalling that old saying, “We’re at war while America is at the mall.” I wondered about the anonymous grunt poet who coined it. Whoever he was, there’s a good chance that even by the time I heard it, he’d already done his four years and gotten out.
Maybe he’d left the Corps, settled into civilian life. Maybe he was in school. Perhaps he was working as a schoolteacher, or as a much-derided civil servant in some corner of our government. Perhaps he found that work more satisfying, more hopeful and of more obvious benefit to his country than the work he’d done in our mismanaged wars.
Or perhaps, if he was as lucky as I have been, he was in some other mall doing exactly what I was — trying to figure out the difference between 6M and 3-6M baby onesies. If so, I wish him well.
Besides, let’s not pretend that living a civilian life — and living it well — isn’t hard. A friend of mine, an officer in the Army Reserves, told me that one of his greatest leadership challenges came not overseas, but when a deployment to Afghanistan got canceled and his men were called to the difficult and often tedious work of being husbands, fathers, members of a community.
My wife and I are raising two sons — the older one is 2 years old, the little one 6 months. And as we follow our national politics with occasional disgust, amusement, horror and hope, we regularly talk about the sort of qualities we want to impress upon our boys so they can be good citizens, and how we can help cultivate in them a sense of service, of gratitude for the blessings they have, and a desire to give back. It’s a daunting responsibility. Right now, though, the day-to-day work of raising these kids doesn’t involve a lot of lofty rhetoric about service. It involves drool, diapers and doing the laundry. For me, it means being that most remarkable, and somehow most unremarkable of things — a dad.
Which is how I found myself that day, less a Marine veteran than a father, shopping with the other parents at Buy Buy Baby, recalling that old saying, “We’re at war while America is at the mall.” I wondered about the anonymous grunt poet who coined it. Whoever he was, there’s a good chance that even by the time I heard it, he’d already done his four years and gotten out.
Maybe he’d left the Corps, settled into civilian life. Maybe he was in school. Perhaps he was working as a schoolteacher, or as a much-derided civil servant in some corner of our government. Perhaps he found that work more satisfying, more hopeful and of more obvious benefit to his country than the work he’d done in our mismanaged wars.
Or perhaps, if he was as lucky as I have been, he was in some other mall doing exactly what I was — trying to figure out the difference between 6M and 3-6M baby onesies. If so, I wish him well.
.........
vbering
Pullman, wa
A lot of the young men don't know the history. As a 58 year-old and a veteran, I do.
The fact is that this country has been at war almost my entire life. It first affected me in 1966 when my dad was drafted. Fortunately he did not have to go to Vietnam and is still alive.
After Vietnam came Lebanon, where a bunch of our Marines got killed for no good reason, then Grenada, where Reagan supposedly got us our groove back, then a few dust-ups with Libya, then Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Iraqi no-fly zones, former Yugoslavia, war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. Oh, I almost forgot about Somalia and Libya, where in getting rid of Gadaffi we helped ISIS out.
The US has its finger in every pie for at least the 50 years I have had awareness and has always been very quick on the military trigger. We depend on an unending supply of brave and deluded young men to fight wars that America keeps getting involved in.
I was one of those deluded young men and so were you. Thank God my son isn't. Both you and I would have been better off going to the mall.
JER.
LEWIS
I’m retired Army, I was in Iraq in 2003, we’d see the tag, “The Marines are at war, America is at the mall. Back in March 2003 I never thought that our involvement in Iraq would last so long. By June 2003 I was sure we’d be in Iraq for at least 10 more years. Because no one in the higher command had the slightest idea what the mission we were trying to accomplish was. The only thing I’m sure we accomplished was to drive up stock prices of defense contractors.
As a veteran I’m sick of being used as a symbol of patriotism. Especially by people who never even thought for a split second of joining. You don’t need to have work a uniform to be a patriot.
Finally, don’t feel the need to thank me for my service, because I didn’t do it for the recognition. And after seeing the way that troops or sailors and Marines are treated by the local population of towns with a large base I don’t believe it.
If you want to support the troops, call or write your representatives and demand they protect the VA from being looted. Don’t be naive enough to think they want to privatize the VA in the name of better care for veterans. They want to transfer billions to the private insurance sector. Many veterans find good jobs with the VA.
Finally demand the reason why we need to send troops into harms way, and ask your representatives if their kids are in the military.
David A. Lee
Ottawa KS
Are our troops and veterans truly defending America and our freedoms, or were America's soldiers since 9/11 compelled to serve as instruments of wars for political goals of which the American people have little or no comprehension, or prefer to ignore? I DO have skin in the game. I've seen some of the young soldiers in my family suffer the consequences of being witness and participants in unspeakable violence, prolonged combat duty, which the American people mostly don't really wish to see or digest. Earlier this week, my wife and I heard the Air Force Academy Band perform a positively brilliant concert in our small Kansas town. But in some inner region of my heart I was very dismayed to hear their leaders praise our troops as the "defenders of our freedom." That's not what my nephews were defending in Iraq, Afghanistan and on several other covert missions in countries with which the American people are not officially at war. They were defending deluded political fools and the foolish missions they were sent to undertake. One of them is now a senior non-commissioned officer. "You know it would take to win in Aghanistan?" he asked. "A half million troops and five or ten years, at least." Nobody ever told the American people that, and nobody in political leadership will ever do so. And he knows that nobody every told him or his buddies that. This is the unvarnished truth about our veteran, and the whole American people today.
Stacy Beth
USA
This is one of the best op-eds I have read in years. It is spot on. I kept reading and reading and agreeing and agreeing and thinking -add this and you did. I couldn't agree more with your thesis and the term patriotic correctness is brilliant. Why is not the school teacher, volunteer zoning board member, the super voter, the IRS staff person, the RMV clerk, Peace Corps personnel, social worker, etc. etc. praised for service and/or engagement in our national policy discussions?
Buelteman
Montara-by-the-Sea CA
A thoughtful and well-written essay. I must point out, however, how patently insane all this talk about "keeping America safe" is. Since I was born in 1954, we have had ZERO military victories - ZERO. Furthermore, NONE of these military adventures happened anywhere near our borders - NONE. Every one a war of choice - like a sick hobby for the powers-that-be to send other people's children to fight for them. So let's reflect on this when we pay our taxes this year, the majority of which will go to the military machine about which we were warned by General Eisenhower. Respect for the military for protecting us? I think not.
james doohan
montana
I understand the POV, but why should we really pay attention? These "wars" are undeclared, have no discernible role in our national interests, and spread misery to parts of the planet in which we have no business. I respect and have sympathy for soldiers and families sacrificing their lives, but really, why? Do we have a rational long-term strategy in any of these hotspots? What are the aims in Syria, Afghanistan, or sub-Saharan Africa? Does anyone foresee the emergence of free and open societies based on democratic principles? Or will the next strongman or warlord or theocracy inherit what we leave? For me the issue is, "Why are we wasting lives and money with no coherent plan?" I oppose the military adventurism and try to vote for candidates who are not going to automatically resort to the military solution. Is there something else I should be doing? Otherwise I will go about my life. Our military is all-volunteer. I you decide to participate, I don't feel obligated to lionize you.
Rich D
Tucson, AZ
As an Air Force veteran, I agree with much of what you say. My Father was a career Army officer who served in Vietnam at the height of the war in 1968. I was in sixth grade at the time and forced to go to a civilian school for the first time in my life. I was beaten up my first week of school when my classmates found out my Father was serving in Vietnam. I was mercilessly bullied the entire year, especially about my crewcut. My Father received no civilian recognition for his service and sacrifice in Vietnam either. It is wonderful that our society today more fully recognizes the sacrifices our men and women in uniform make.
When I served in the 80's in the Air Force, there was neither undue hatred or adulation of those in uniform. But what I have always believed is that a national draft or some form of compulsory service for all is absolutely essential to preventing unnecessary wars and having a society that is fully vested in any and all military pursuits. If we had that, everyone would know about Niger and what our troops were doing there or, perhaps, they wouldn't be there at all. And we should never use mercenaries like Blackwater, an utterly obscene practice in my view.
As for General Kelly, I too recognize his service and sacrifice to this country. But that never entitles anyone to utter blatantly false, racist statements about an African American Congresswoman and never apologize for it. By behaving in that manner, he demeans the service of us all.
Anne
NYC
Thank you for this article. Two things have particularly troubled me about the Kelly incident:
(1) The assumption that the military is the only way to serve one's country. Our family has included a schoolteacher, a music therapist with the terminally ill, a nursing home patient advocate, and an administrator and a teacher in rehabilitation programs for the blind. Especially when I think of the underpaid schoolteachers who are striking for more aid to their school districts today, I hardly think of these professions as "worthless sponge lives" spent "at the mall" (spending money they aren't paid). One of my former students does volunteer tax prep for the working poor, another aspires to be a lawyer for the poor and underserved. Where would our country be if those forms of service were (and they are) neglected because they are deemed unworthy?
(2) That Kelly, in his contemptuous and self-righteous speech, never offered his condolences to the pregnant widow even while claiming recognition for having lost his own son.
ChesBay
Maryland
None of this arbitrary waging of war, all over the world, keeps anyone, in this country, safe or "free.". We should be ashamed of ourselves for pursuing incessant war, while Americans live on the streets, and go hungry; while kids fail to get a quality education; citizens have to choose between medical treatment and paying the rent; and while the flower of our youth lose their lives for no good reason. I am sick of it.
GWBear
Florida
Wow! This is truly one of the most balanced, most thoughtful, and honest discussions of the relationship between the US Military and the Civilization population they represent, that I have read in a long time. The author nails numerous issues I have been profoundly concerned about for decades... issues I first studied in depth in College, and never left behind.
I too am greatly disturbed by the disconnect between the military and the rest of us - and the increasing role of the military leadership, and some government officials, in promoting that divide. It’s led us to a dangerous place indeed. We have a President uniquely unqualified like none before, leading our military, making military policy, with his finger on the nuclear trigger. General Kelly tells us to shut up and sit down - that we don’t have a voice and don’t deserve one.
Nothing could be further from the truth! Our country was deliberately formed so that we would NOT have a Warrior Class: that civilians would make up the military, and they controlled the military. It’s the disconnect from this sacred bond that has led us to think a Trump in charge of the world’s largest military is OK. Or, that we can teeter on the brink of nuclear war with the DPRK, or a major conflict that We Start with Iran or Russia - and just shrug and go about our lives.
We have strayed far from the Founder’s ideals. We need to find our way back, before Stupidity claims us all in some pointless, world altering conflict.
