by Chris Bodenner
Neal Freeman notices an increased activism from military families against the "global agenda" of neoconservatism:
It includes not just active-duty spouses and retired military personnel, and not just their families, friends and base-neighbors. It includes also a vast number of Americans who love the military, honor them and see in them a unique restorative capability in a society gone soft and commonsense-less. For the first time in my reporting experience, this extended military family has become fully engaged in the political process: you see them at gatherings everywhere, from Republican and Tea Party to independent and goo-goo. And they're no longer sitting in the back taking notes. They are moving up front and taking leadership roles.
William Deresiewicz's essay on the empty sentimentalism toward the military is worth invoking:
The greater the sacrifice that has fallen on one small group of people, the members of the military and their families, the more we have gone from supporting our troops to putting them on a pedestal. In the Second World War, everybody fought. Soldiers were not remote figures to most of us; they were us. Now, instead of sharing the burden, we sentimentalize it. It’s a lot easier to idealize the people who are fighting than it is to send your kid to join them. This is also a form of service, I suppose: lip service.
How many more years in Iraq and Afghanistan will it take for neocons to see that "supporting the troops" is sapping the troops? Deresiewicz also eloquently touches upon a recent thread on the Dish:
[S]ervice members feel uneasy when strangers approach them to — as the well-meaning but oddly impersonal ritual goes — thank them for their service, thereby turning them into paradoxically anonymous celebrities. It was wrong to demonize our service members in Vietnam; to canonize them now is wrong as well. Both distortions make us forget that what they are are human beings.
(Photo: Family and friends await Marines during a homecoming ceremony on October 4, 2008 at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California. By Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
The Dish 