It is the
VETERAN,
not the preacher,
who has given us freedom of religion.
It is
the VETERAN,
not the reporter,
who has given us freedom of the press.
It is
the VETERAN,
not the poet,
who has given us freedom of speech.
It is
the VETERAN,
not the campus organizer,
who has given us freedom to assemble.
It is
the VETERAN,
not the lawyer,
who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is
the VETERAN,
not the politician,
Who has given us the right to vote.
I would have thought that politicians and legislators, notably Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had rather more to do with giving those Bill of Rights freedoms than veterans of any war.
O.K. maybe the oppotunity to exercise these rights,just part of an e-mail I recieved from a vet to honor,thank and remember on this Memorial Day week-end.
Probably like you, I receive emails from friends and acquaintances just about every day which distort history and reason to present something to support what are usually quite narrow and often bigoted views, generally with a nationalistic theme presenting simplistic ‘arguments’ about specific issues such as immigration, race and crime.
The ‘Veterans’ one you presented fits that category, albeit with the unusual feature of being positive rather than negative about a group.
I don’t have much time for politicians, at least the current type of self-promoting, party-hack, craven arseholes, but there were some grand idealists around the time of the War of Independence and the French Revolution whose ideals and stands in defence of them have yet to be bettered.
I acknowledge that veterans of all wars in all nations fought in pursuit of whatever it was that their nation wanted them to fight for, whether or not they wanted to or supported the national ambitions.
Whether veterans themselves fought for those things may be debatable (a constant theme in Australian WWI enlistments was going off on a great personal adventure of, at best, imperialistic ambition rather than anything to do with noble concepts of liberty or anything else) and whether what they fought for was worthwhile or honourable (such as the conflict between Japanese expansion to counteract European colonialism in China and elsewhere which was trying to strangle Japan in its own region).
If things had turned out differently we would now have acknowledgement of the veterans who imposed various forms of inhumane fascism on Europe, Asia and sundry other places.
None of that would have altered the contribution of veterans to the existence of such regimes or their values any more than veterans contributed to the existence of the Bill of Rights, but in all cases it would have ignored the fact that the principles, good or bad, for which veterans fought were created and purused by politicians and legislators.
And some veterans aren’t, on any common sense let alone moral scale, worthy of anything except overwhelming contempt and disgust even post-WWII, such as the Khmer Rouge.
Then again, there are people in many parts of the world who have the same attitude towards veterans from ‘our’ side, and in some cases with very good reason from their experience of being denied just the freedom to live, never mind Bill of Rights freedoms.
So I wouldn’t ascribe to veterans of any conflict the virtue or fault of giving what politicians before them gave, be it good or bad.