Last night I was watching the News Hour on PBS. There was a report on who exactly is bearing the brunt of our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Yeah, I know this is very old and boring news. They're sacrificing, I'm not. Yada, yada, yada.
I acknowledge I have a problem, I tend not to see much nuance in ugly things. Healthcare is a black and white issue for me, so is the situation in Iraq.
What they're voting for is the slaughter of the children of others. Al Gore gave me psychic permission to write this diary which touches the third rail of Daily Kos.
I choose to stand with the former President Vice President. Among other things, he counsels in his breathtaking new book, The Assault on Reason, that it is long overdue for Americans--you and me--to embrace some terrible realities about our country.
This grotesque reality--who serves and who doesn't--is worth repeating, the day after the political class gave Mr. Bush another pass to keep killing the kid of the other guy.
The Other Guy. He's the one serving.
Who is that other guy? He's the faceless American, he's the one that doesn't have access to affordable healthcare. He's the fireman who runs in when everyone else is running out. In our military, the other guy is often a low-income American. Or not even an American, can't you "earn" citizenship by volunteering for military duty?
This is what this vote is all about for me--it's about the other guy. It's about the children of others. I'm not sacrificing a damn thing. Are you?
I'm a very blessed American. I've been asked for nothing, and like most, I've given next to nothing. I have no skin in the game, do you?
Do you know what it means to have skin in the game? It's a term coined by Warren Buffett referring to a situation in which high-ranking insiders use their own money to buy stock in the company they are running. If they own the stock,so the theory goes, they'll do their level best to make sure the trains run on time.
I was around during Vietnam, the days when we had a draft. I'm sorry if it's painful to read how conscription breeds activism. How conscription does a little to level the playing field--spread around the pain. Back then, the streets of this country were filled with outraged American citizens when some sons of privilege were forced to enlist. My own brother came within days of being drafted. We had a lottery in those days, if my memory serves me correctly, the lottery came within a few numbers of his. It was really scary, my parents and all our upper middle class friends were in the streets and working overtime to end the tragedy of Vietnam. There was no business as usual in those days.
This isn't happening today. Yes, on Daily Kos, we're engaged, but once I turn off my computer, it's back to business.
And yes I know the cowards running this country, never served. Those sons of privilege were "too busy" or went AWOL. But others did. Today I do not know one person serving in Iraq. I had a serviceman pen pal for awhile, someone i never met, but he disappeared.
There was a time when the American people did bring down a president. Do you think the political class fears a bunch of mealy mouthed entitled citizens--like me, who write crap like this, then sleep peacefully every night with nary a worry about anything more terrible than high gas prices.
Simply put, what's going on, and our collective unwillingness to call it what it is, is another Assault on Reason.
Here's what PBS reported last night about the other guy.
The parents of our low-income, other guy servicemen and woman are still raising money to buy them body armor. Now this makes no sense to me.
Boring, boring, boring. When's Paris going to jail?
It's not your kid or mine--right? If it were. . .well it's not, so let's just move along. Like I said, it's old news. But it's not old news if your kid comes home as cargo in a wood box.
PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent: A recent Saturday at a Harley dealership in Tennessee, for months, Javier and Marian LaRosa have been raising money to privately buy body armor for their son, and for the other Marines in his squadron, before they deploy to Iraq in June.
JAVIER LAROSA: We feel that, if these guys are going to go and put their lives on the line, the least that we can do to bring them back alive.
http://www.pbs.org/...
I have my progressive bona fides.
I've earned the right to say what's on my mind.
And what's on my mind today is not healthcare, it's the gross unfairness of our broken "voluntary" army.
If we go for the truth around here, then let's talk about this so-called voluntary army business. It's a crock of shit. Add the military to the long list of things Mr. Bush has destroyed.
Do you think if the children of the affluent were serving, they would lack body armor, or we'd consider the discussion so been there, done that?
PAUL SOLMAN: Or at least this man thinks they're a symbol of those paying for the war: Robert Hormats, who served under Presidents Bush I, Reagan, and Carter, and has for years been vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, a wing of the world's largest investment bank.
To Hormats, families buying body armor for their children vividly shows why the Iraq war differs from any other in American history, that those fighting it are bearing nearly all of the costs, while the rest of us aren't paying at all.
ROBERT HORMATS, Investment Banker: Americans haven't paid higher taxes. They haven't engaged in the purchase of war bonds. They haven't had to sacrifice through rationing. They haven't planted victory gardens. Every other war, there's been a sacrifice on the homefront to help those people, support those people fighting abroad. None this time.
It strikes me that there are only a handful of people on the public stage capable of speaking these sorts of inconvenient truths. Names like Al Gore and John Edwards come to mind.
PAUL SOLMAN: For a big-city reporter then, with no family or friends in Iraq, a beneficiary of tax cuts every year of the war, it felt almost embarrassing to be in Tennessee with the LaRosas.
I don't mean to personalize this too much, but are you in some sense resentful that people like, say, myself, bear no costs in this war?
JAVIER LAROSA: I'm not angry at you, because you personally bear no sacrifice, OK? I am calling on the nation. We did it in World War II. I am angry that the rest of the nation is not sacrificing more.
And we're not even giving the injured medical care. Again that's because people like me and my kin have no skin in the game.
No health insurance. The United States of America shits on its voluntary army.
And every Democrat who votes to give an unelected president who belongs not in the White House but before a war crimes tribunal what he demands, is complicit in the atrocities you're reading about here.
PAUL SOLMAN: The Veterans Administration has declared Heun 100 percent disabled.
SGT. BRAD HEUN: Basically, I'm going to get worse. It's a matter of time.
PAUL SOLMAN: You're going to get worse?
SGT. BRAD HEUN: Yes, sir. They told me, if I ain't careful, I might end up in a wheelchair.
PAUL SOLMAN: The Army, however, discharged him with only a 20 percent disability. Anything under 30 percent means no benefits.
Wait a second. You don't have health insurance from the Army?
SGT. BRAD HEUN: No, sir.
PAUL SOLMAN: Now, Heun gets his own medical care from the VA, plus $2,500 a month to support his family of five, but no health insurance at all for them.
SGT. BRAD HEUN: So I'm trying to pay for a COBRA policy to try to keep my kids with insurance.
PAUL SOLMAN: Well, that must be what, $800 a month?
SGT. BRAD HEUN: We couldn't afford that, sir. We got -- our policy is $400 a month, and it's got extremely high deductibles.
BEVERLY HEUN, Wife of Injured Veteran: At $1,500.
SGT. BRAD HEUN: Per person.
BEVERLY HEUN: Per person.
PAUL SOLMAN: Meanwhile, Beverly Heun has had back surgery of her own, from a car accident. And their 2-year-old daughter needs surgery, but they've had to put it off.
BEVERLY HEUN: We don't want to do it at the expense of her not having a home to live in. I think it's a disgrace to this country for me to even be sitting her trying to tell you this.
PAUL SOLMAN: Heun is appealing, but...
SGT. BRAD HEUN: Well, that's another lawyer's fee. And so that's just -- you know, why is a soldier having to pay for all these lawyers to do these appeals?
As I said, I'm not sacrificing anything, nor I'll bet are many of you. Certainly the miserable cowardly politicians who endorsed this crap yesterday, are sacrificing exactly nothing.
PAUL SOLMAN: Do you feel the Army is taking care of you?
SGT. BRAD HEUN: No, sir.
BEVERLY HEUN: I don't think that they care about the soldier. They definitely don't care about the soldier's family.
SGT. BRAD HEUN: I did what I believed is right, and I would do it again. But, you know, are they really taking care of you?
JOSEPH STIGLITZ: These people have signed up and they -- if they don't lose their lives, if they don't lose their limbs, they will be better off than they would have been otherwise. But the cost of this is enormous; the risks that they're being asked to face is enormous.
PAUL SOLMAN: And the lack of support the rest of us are providing, says Robert Hormats, is unprecedented in American history.
ROBERT HORMATS: In all wars, you get people who go in, in part because it's economically beneficial, but still Americans have provided them with sufficient financial support. During World War I, the treasury secretary, McAdoo, said, "You can be sure that, when Americans send their sons abroad" -- only men at that point -- "they're willing, in fact, they're eager to provide money to support their sons who are fighting," in that case in Western Europe.
There's still a requirement that government should ask other people who are not making that sacrifice, who are not in the trenches of France, as they were in those days, or fighting in the deserts of Iraq, to make some sort of commitment to the war, also.
PAUL SOLMAN: It's a commitment and sacrifice, say Hormats and others, that most Americans have not yet been asked to make.
A sacrifice that most Americans have not yet been asked to make.
Talk about an Assault on Reason.