> Pure State Television. Karl Rove could barely
> improve on this, and I wonder if local news
> everywhere is this bad.
Oh God, is it ever. Someone from Western Pennsylvania gets killed in Iraq about once a week, and there are stories about these families frequently. The best reactions that I have seen to this phenomenon come from my not-quite-in-laws (I am not married, but might as well be); my partner and her parents are from Bosnia and were in Sarajevo at the height of the siege. Anyway, every time a military family loses a loved one and goes on TV to talk about how "proud" they are of their departed son or daughter, my in-laws basically go ballistic, cursing in both English and Serbo-Croatian about what bad parents and "fucking idiots" these people are for letting their children go to war in the first place for the sake of "Dick Cheney oil."
Needless to say, this is not the kind of attitude toward military families that we can afford to have if we're to encourage and build a movement against the war that includes them -- it is very disturbing to see their pain, and to witness the convoluted justifications they put up to convince themselves that their loved ones did not die in vain. For people like my Bosnian in-laws who have actually been through war, however -- not as soldiers, "volunteer" or otherwise, but as civilian victims -- there's a very agitated contempt for anyone who participates in these wars. In Bosnia itself, it was the bloodthirsty sorts who actually volunteered to fight who were held in the lowest regard by most of the rest of the population.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!