RE: Unalienable Rights...

["Tom Hansen" <thansen@moscow.com>]

Greetings Visionaires -

I support Mr. Kaag's comments 100%.  As a retired Army NCO with almost 21
years of service, I find Ms. Huskey's comments to be absolutely appalling.
To blame the soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors who are willing to fight
and die to preserve Ms. Huskey's freedoms for restrictions placed on those
same freedoms is unconscionable.

Ms Huskey, what gives you the self-righteous gall to make such an
allegation?  It is easy for those in ivory towers to make vague inflamatory
comments about those whose sworn duty it is to protect and defend the castle
against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  Just remember that without those
brave protectors, the ivory towers turn to dust.

Take care,

Tom Hansen
SFC, U.S. Army (Retired)

***********************************
Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.

- Author Unknown
***********************************

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don Kaag [mailto:dkaag@turbonet.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 8:30 PM
> To: Vision 2020
> Subject: Unalienable Rights...
>
>
> 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
>
>