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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (13056)	8/12/2007 9:49:17 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224718

Americans getting steamed:Shameful stunt for peace The Arizona Republic Aug. 12, 2007 With all due respect to the nation's anti-war movement, the decision to enter the service is a choice to be made by young men and women and their families. Not by the activists. Since the very first day of classes, anti-war activists have been at Valley high school gates handing out "opt-out" literature - postcards that, if signed and sent, would remove the students' contact information from lists provided to military recruiters. Typically, the groups also bring anti-war signs. And some protesters make disparaging remarks about the military generally. In far too many respects, modern society insists that children grow up way too fast. In others - the issue of military recruitment, for example - we infantilize them. The voting age is 18 for a reason. We assume 18-year-old citizens are sufficiently developed to make important choices. Late last week, state schools superintendent Tom Horne condemned the demonstrations, which he feels disrupt the school environment. Horne is spot on: "Reasonable people can differ about a particular war, but to have adults teaching students to be hostile to the military institutions that defend our freedom is educationally dysfunctional." In the superheated rhetoric over the war in Iraq, the opaque line between hostility to a president and hostility to the military serving overseas is getting difficult to gauge. Increasingly, the preferred view of our young people in uniform, at least among some strident war opponents, is less than noble. It often sees them as somehow damaged by their service. The flare-up over first-person reports from Iraq in the New Republic - which once supported the invasion but is now turned ardently opposed to the war - is a case in point. The reports (the veracity of which is seriously in question) characterize Americans in Iraq as unthinking, unfeeling savages who run over dogs for kicks. That is not the U.S. military that, in truth, is the envy of the world. The protesters at the school gates would do well to think of it in the truer light.<