A Nation of Cowards with a Military to Match

 

 

I hope that’s a headline that makes most of you angry, because if it does that to enough of you, maybe, just maybe we can reverse the trend.

 

I don’t know how long the taint of cowardice has been infecting this country but I do know that it really blossomed after 911. Somehow the realization that we could be the victims of terrorists just like the rest of the world really shook our false sense of invincibility and that immediately began to erode our belief in the necessity for the freedoms expressed in our constitution.  All of a sudden, the demolition of the twin towers, even as it inspired acts of unparalleled heroism, also revealed a streak of cowardice that few of us had realized existed in this all but invincible nation.

 

Rather than react to the attack of 911 the way we should have, rather then stand up on our hind legs, shake our fists at our real enemies and bellow, in the true tradition of American challenge, bring it on, we passed the Patriot Act, we collapsed into a fetal ball of goo and immediately began divesting ourselves of our freedoms; this, in the vain hope that such cowardice would keep us safe from the bad guys. The Patriot Act, boy, has anything ever been so miss-named.

 

Oh, we bristled and puffed up, our feathers, invading two minor countries that despite our staggering military superiority we never managed to defeat but when push came to shove we really caved at home, stripping our suddenly subservient people, one by one of the rights that two hundred years of Americans have always, until now, fought to protect.

 

Bush and Cheney started it, allowing all kinds of invasive attacks on our privacy and now Obama is continuing it, endangering habeus corpus and allowing our military and intelligence agencies to plunder all our rights of privacy. And the public, terrified of a virtually non-existent terrorist threat just rolls over on its back and begs the government to take away more of their rights as long as no one hurts them. In 2008 Obama ran on a promise to end warrantless wiretapping. He has since become embroiled up to his eyeballs in scandals over government monitoring of citizens that would make George Orwell turn over in his grave.

 

It’s disgusting and a disgrace and it’s happening just as Osama bin Laden predicted. Bin laden knew he could never defeat us, militarily, but he looked at a fat, lazy nation, engulfed in its plush sofa of security and greed and he foresaw what would happen as soon as he took away our blanky. And boy was he right; we caved like a dish of wet noodles. “Take away our rights,” we cried, just don’t let the bad Arab with the dialysis machine strapped to his back hurt us.

 

It has taken less than a dozen years to unravel and abandon the freedoms that we started a revolution with England to secure. Now we stand naked and helpless, not before the terrorists but before our own government and the fanatics and incompetents who inhabit it.

 

There have been less people killed in this country by foreign terrorists in the dozen years since 911 than are killed by illegal guns on the streets of Chicago on any single day. For protection from this mini-threat we have given up our freedom and rights of privacy almost entirely. Our phones and Internet communications can be tapped, our homes entered, our bodies invaded and then held in captivity without any legal recourse. To protect us from nothing, we have allowed our government to turn the U.S.A. into a South American dictatorship. We are now the slaves of 1984 and it happened because we were afraid to stand up and take the hit, whatever it was before we would give up our freedom.

 

And the military is no better. I’m not talking about the kids who take the fire, the kids who man the deadly outposts in countries that don’t know why we’re fighting them and put life and limb on the line  so Bush & Cheney could lose the oil of Iraq to China? Is that a reason for our kids to get killed? No, those soldiers, sailors and marines are outrageously brave; it’s the command, along with the suits in the Pentagon to whom I am referring when I call them cowards, for those are the ones who have given up their honor and their moral integrity to protect that which needs no protecting.

 

Millions have said it; war is hell, and its hell because the worst things imaginable happen in war. Atrocity is not new to our lifetimes. Atrocities have happened ever since man picked up a stick and shoved it into another guy’s eye. When we, as a nation, decide that we are going to engage in a war, any kind of a war, those who lead us must understand that bad things, things we do not normally accept, will happen. They must also understand that those bad things must be dealt with through the understanding of what they are; anomalies. But we must also understand that those anomalies still must be dealt with. War, for the most part, exists outside the norms of human behavior but to allow it to go forth completely unrestrained is contrary to civilized logic. So we make rules, even for wars.

 

Those rules, those laws of civilized behavior, exist under unrelieved stress in combat and young men, emotionally or intellectually unable to resist the savage emotions unleashed by the brutal chaos of the battlefield have been known to ignore the rules of combat and commit horrible atrocities.

 

When that happens, and it will happen, because it is the nature of war that it will happen, it takes great courage for “the military” to deal with it in a sensible and forthright manner. Our military has shown no evidence of its being able to do that.

 

It’s normal, for instance, for a company commander to try to protect the men under his command, men he has fought alongside of, from repercussions due to unacceptable combat behavior. But that’s why the armed forces have always maintained a chain of command. Someplace in that chain of command there must be a place where the buck stops. Where someone says, these men did wrong. They did wrong because of this or that, but they did wrong, and then that individual must decide, based on the specific situation and circumstances what to do about it.

 

Nowhere is it acceptable for that chain of command to ignore any abnormal situation or to try to cover up the details of it in order to protect the reputation of the service. All our services have so many thousands of instances of incredible bravery and functional action that they just don’t need defending. What they need is discipline and a sense that they will be held accountable for their actions. The present military hierarchy has failed to do this over and over, and now in a blatant attempt to cover up an atrocity that they should have dealt with immediately, they are crucifying a mere private, who made what he considered a moral decision, in an attempt to make us forget the actual atrocity and their embarrassment for not dealing with it in an honest manner. This is cowardice of the most egregious kind, and it and the way our military has dealt with the question of sexual molestation throughout the services is pure unadulterated cowardice.

 

When I was a boy, this was a brave country, or at least we thought it was. Now we are a nation of cowards – and it has to stop.