Unalienable Rights...

[Don Kaag <dkaag@turbonet.com>]

Visionaries:

Melynda says, ..." And our First Amendment rights, not the paternal 
good nature of the folks with the guns, protect the expression of our 
dissent...."

It is to secure those rights that soldiers bled in the snow at Valley 
Forge, and fought a revolution.  Without those soldiers, ragged and 
poorly-armed as they were, standing up to one of the best armies in the 
world, and their Hessian mercenaries, we would have no Constitution and 
no Bill of Rights.

Again in 1812 we fought the British to keep our liberty, and it was 
soldiers and sailors and armed militia who put their lives on the line 
at Lake Erie and Bladensburg and New Orleans.  Meanwhile, American 
civilians in New England were making a nice living selling supplies to 
the British and the Canadians.

We intervened militarily in 1917 to secure the victory of democracy 
over despotism in Europe in WWI.  It was U.S. soldiers and Marines who 
fought at St. Mihiel, Belleau Wood, Blanc Mont and the Second Battle of 
the Marne that saved England, France and Belgium, and American sailors 
who got them and their suppies there, across an Atlantic filled with 
U-boats.  One hundred seventy thousand died doing it.

The generation that survived the Great Depression also fought WWII, and 
saved the western world yet again from fascists and imperialistic 
empires, and preserved yet again Americans' rights.  Do you think that 
without American men in uniform with guns that the Nazis and the 
Japanese would have spared the United States?  And where would your 
First Amendment Rights have been, then?

After 50 years we won the Cold War, and now democracy and freedom are 
spreading to countries and peoples long held in bondage. "The folks 
with the guns", did that, too.  (And yes, Vietnam was a part of that 
war, and 58 thousand American men and women sacrificed their lives 
there, too.  Which is not nearly the number of Vietnamese who have 
perished trying to escape the communist paradise of the People's 
Republic of Vietnam, or who perished in post-war "reeducation camps". )

If it weren't for "the folks with the guns", no American would have 
First Amendment rights.  The right to dissent is an essential one of 
those rights, and men and women with guns ensure that all Americans 
keep it.  We don't have to agree to what you are dissenting about to 
defend your right to do so.  That is immaterial.  Our military forces 
are not "paternalistic", just essential to the preservation of liberty.

Your view of the United States Military is pathetic.  We are not 
thuggish automatons.  We took an oath to "Support and defend the 
Constitution of the United States of America".  We took it seriously.  
We don't do coups in this country.  Our military is apolitical.  They 
serve the people of the United States and their Constitution.  No one 
values First Amendment rights as much as military men and women.  We 
are willing to fight and die for them... and not out of "paternal good 
nature", either... it is our calling and our privilege.

And as for the military causing constraints on liberties, let me remind 
you that it was Abraham Lincoln who suspended habeus corpus during the 
Civil War, not the military.  It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who 
signed the executive order putting Nisei into detention camps for the 
duration of WWII, and Earl Warren of California who recommended he do 
so.  Hugo Black wrote the Supreme Court decision that approved the 
camps ex post facto.  None of them ever wore a uniform, and all of them 
stand in the ranks of liberal statesmen in this country.  They were 
wrong.  But they were representatives of the elected civilian 
government, not the military.

In another century, and another country, the great poet Rudyard Kipling 
said, "Makin' fun o' uniforms/That guard you while you sleep/Is cheaper 
than those uniforms/And they're starvation cheap".

Make fun of uniforms.  Go ahead, it's your right under the First 
Amendment.  It is tacky, but it is your right.  And we will defend it.

Regards,

Don Kaag