December 17, 2004
Troops
So, regarding my own journey in how I see soldiers.
As you get more into politics, this becomes more of an issue. It's kind of odd. It's very possible for someone not politically engaged to go through life not even considering joining the armed forces, not thinking about war, and just basically believing that soldiers and war-making has nothing to do with oneself as a person.
But then you start to care about how the country works. And even if you are just focused on things like domestic policy, you start to get pulled into the subjects of war, and justifications for war, and whether to protest war, and what that means about how you feel about the troops.
It is hard to reconcile. Violence is bad. That violence is ever even necessary means that a failure has already occurred. Succumbing to violence means that you accept that that failure cannot be rectified. Other abuse may have already happened, but the beginnings of violence is always an escalation.
And, there are times where removing oneself from a situation that has nothing to do with you is the right way to go. I would leave a relationship that was physically violent. I would disown that relationship. And it is considered healthy to feel no personal responsibility for the fact that the other person in that relationship is a violent person.
And yet, if I leave a violent neighborhood for the next neighborhood over, do I feel entirely unconnected? Probably not. What happens if the entity you want to disconnect from is something you actually can't leave?
And for the people that join the armed forces - an entirely different way of life than I am accustomed to - it is easy to feel, "That is their choice. Their choices are not my responsibility. These soldiers create their own reality. And these soldiers, even though they are taking orders, are choosing to make war, to kill. And that is their responsibility."
I think this is a snapshot of how many "beginning liberals" feel. I see it a lot over at Daily Kos.
The journey starts at feeling uncomfortable at how we are painted. That our war protestations are seen as against the troops. That's a tough reflection. It's maddening because it's manipulative, but because we can also see how people would believe it. So we labor to stress that we are anti-war and yet support the troops.
We explain it by saying that we want to support the troops by wanting to bring them home and not waste their lives in a needless war. And yet, it's unclear to us whether this is an entirely honest explanation, or if it's also a bit of a rationalization. It's easier in this war, because it is painfully obvious how many of these soldiers really are being completely victimized by this administration, and how many of them know it and just have no way out. But there have always been soldiers, and the victimization is not always this clear. And what of the soldier that is fully signed on to the cause of the war? Or of the soldier that trusts the leadership implicitly? Is it right for us to think for that soldier, and support that soldier coming home even when they might not be wishing for that? Is it morally right because their life is being wasted? Or is it morally wrong because it goes against the soldier's wishes?
I guess this is where I am now. I would never join the armed forces. It is so centrally incompatible to who I am. There is more than one way to serve one's country. I believe I can better serve my country by following my own passions than by following someone else's orders. But the examination of the cultures that make up our society is important if we want to try to change our society. And implicit in this is an acceptance and understanding of these different cultures. Acceptance does not mean advocacy, not in this sense. But I have made the transition towards believing - not just coaching myself to say, but truly believing - that the military culture is linked to our culture, and must be understood and accepted in some sense.
Beyond that point, I don't know what to do. It doesn't feel right to reject it to the point of just acting like it doesn't even apply. It doesn't feel right to declare it irrelevant, when I do have friends of friends who are serving. It doesn't feel right to ignore the dynamics in our society that create the demand to join the armed forces. But I also have my principles, that too much structure and discipline robs us of life and love, that an organization that is trained only to see problems in terms of oppositional conflict is not a good organization to solve those problems, that violence remains bad and that we resort to violence too quickly, and that even the most downtrodden amongst us still has a choice other than state-sponsored killing.
So, that's where I am now. I'll keep working at it, because I don't like unresolved feelings. As they say, developing...