Something to think about this Saturday morning

promoted by ek hornbek

There’s a piece being written on in a number of blogs about a poll that indicates Bush has little support among military families, who probably are not going to vote for a Republican president next year.  It’s surprising to a lot of people who think of the military as an undifferentiated mass that gets told what to do (which is true) and how to think (they get told, but most eventually believe their experience instead).  Their families get lumped in there, too.

Those families used to vote the way their military members did, and military members used to uniformly (sorry) support “conservative” candidates.  I grew up in a military family, right after World War II.  I thought what I was told to think, that conservatism equaled patriotism, until I had enough education and work experience to know differently.  The votes of these families are going to reflect painful and terribly unjust personal experiences.

Any other subject and I would be able to write an essay about defeating a Republican into a masterpiece of clever snark.  This subject encompasses too much pain, too much suffering, and too much destruction.  The magnitude of what has happened to these families, the stories that underly the result of that poll, are just too awful.  I won’t  be able to touch it here, but I offer links that can get readers close, and I defer to them for a description of the ordeals that military families endure.