Re: Free Speech Forum and March for Human Rights...

["Melynda Huskey" <mghuskey@hotmail.com>]

 

Don Kaag writes:

 

"[ROTC] provided the trained 'from the people' officers who commanded and led the men and women who ensured that you could make a march like this.  They shed their blood to keep you free.
" 'For those who have served, freedom has a taste---and a price---that
the protected will never know.' (Found written on a piece of C-Rat box
cardboard, and nailed to a tree outside a firebase near Khe Sahn, RVN,
1965.)"

 

And I have to wonder what freedom, exactly, was being protected at Khe Sahn?  I'm lucky--my dad came back from Operation Prairie II in Viet Nam unharmed in mind or body, unlike many of his fellow Marines.   

 

A citizen's right to protest war is not granted through the magnanimity of the armed services.  In fact, those rights have often been suspended in U.S. history at the behest of the military in order to protect it from criticism.  It is our persistence and our conviction that keep us marching, not the generosity of the military.  And our First Amendment rights, not the paternal good nature of the folks with the guns, protect the expression of our dissent.

 

People can disagree in good conscience about particular wars, or about war in general; although I have been a pacifist all my life for religious reasons, I recognize that others have entirely different opinions held with equal conviction.  It's unfair and inaccurate, however, to claim that we enjoy our position simply as a luxury accorded to us by the superior self-sacrifice and moral superiority of those who serve in the armed forces.

 

Melynda Huskey

---

Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com