I'll freely admit I'm a newcomer to this community,
although I've read, and agreed with most of what I
see here with regard to the importance of getting
Bush out of office, but I've got a serious issue
with some of the sentiments expressed here following
what happened in Fallujah.
First, some background: I've been gay my entire life.
Growing up in Athens, GA, this wasn't always the
easiest thing for me to be. Believe me, there are times
that, had I any choice in the matter, I would gladly
have circumvented the routine ass-beatings, mockery,
and disdain from my neighbors and classmates by being
heterosexual if I could. But I couldn't. It's ingrained
in me. I knew that I was "that way" the moment I first
saw the movie "Flash Gordon", and had "improper feelings"
for Flash, himself. Throughout high school, though, I
learned to keep those feelings quiet, until I could
escape to somewhere; anywhere. Upon graduation, I
enlisted in the Marine Corps, hoping that I could
become an anonymous member of a community that would
have me, provided I just keep my mouth shut about my
sexuality.
And I did. For almost the full six years. There were
a couple other gay Marines where I ended up being deployed,
and the three of us knew that it was in our best interest
to keep quiet about our longings; our basic desires as
sexual human beings. I walked away from the Corps with
a lot of very good friends, to whom I am bonded closely
with to this day, all of them now knowing that I am now,
and have always been gay. After the corps, I, like so
many other homosexuals before me, moved to San Francisco,
and finally felt alive; free to be myself, in all
my gay glory. This was the dawning of my political awakening,
if you will. It finally occurred to me that, all that oppression
I had undergone as an awkward teen was unnecessary.
Where before, I had been blinded by "patriotism" and
"duty to country", I now was aware that being GAY didn't
mean I wasn't patriotic. Voting for Democrats didn't
mean that, either. If anything, I came to believe that
the Democratic party was more patriotic than
the groupthinkers in the Republinazi Party; where
they talked of "freedom" and "democracy", what they
really wanted was a theocracy, wherein those who
are different just keep their mouths shut.
These days, the two other gay marines I knew are out
of the Corps as well, and both are working for military
consulting firms. In short, they've found a place where
their abilities as soldiers still come in as very useful,
and where the employers themselves, under contract of
the US Military, just don't care about what their sexual
persuasion is. They are at home, and they're doing their
jobs as soldiers, doing the best they can in a war over oil.
So when I see our fearless leader saying something like
this, I can't help but think that, by not considering these
comrades of my friends as humans, with lives that should
have been preserved, and should now be mourned, maybe
this site, with which I mostly agree and support, isn't
really the place for me. It's almost like the groupthinking
has crept into Progressive politics, in a very reactionary
form. Reading what Kos wrote there makes me sad, and embarrassed
to have been associated with other former soldiers who might
say the same thing, having lost sight of the importance and
dignity of human lives; every human life. Those so-called
"mercenaries" that died have mothers and fathers. They have
people that care about them, and will miss them, and in an
economy where we're down some 3 million jobs, is it really
that surprising that people with skills taught to them
by the military industrial complex might feel as if that's
the only thing they can do? Do those people deserve to die,
just for following orders? I don't think they do. I love
my former soldier comrades, and when I see otherwise-morally
forthright people callously lump them in as "part of the
problem", I feel pain, hurt, and anguish. I hope I'm wrong
about people here; I hope this is an anomaly.
We need to concentrate on one thing: preventing this
from happening again at the highest level. We need
to get that lying bastard and his evil administration
out of office. What we DON'T need to do is
start trivializing lives lost on either side of this,
albeit unjust, war.
