"bb" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 09 May 2006 17:43:18 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

It helps to understand the mindset of people who
may decide to send MY son off to a war with no purpose.

Wars always have a purpose, Doug. Sometimes, like in civil wars, it's
to unify a country. Sometimes, like WWII, it is to protect our
freedoms and way of life from tyrants. Sometimes, like Viet Nam, or
Iraq, it is for profits. Wars always have a purpose. Some are always
willing to sacrifice themselves and their children, no matter what the
purpose. Some make personal choices about when to make personal
sacrifices for the general benefit of all, and when to resist making
personal sacrifices for the benefit of the privileged class. There
will always be those who severely judge those who have the treasonous
ability to make personal choices that put their own personal well
being, and those of their loved ones, above the profit motives of the
military industrial complex.

Throughout history, it's been rare to find those who resist making
sacrifices when there is a real threat to the well being of the
society as a whole.

There will always be those who blindly follow. FWER, those who
blindly follow tend to look down on those who don't blindly follow. I
have never seen any evidence to show there is any difference in the
willingness of either group to serve and sacrifice when the threat is
clear. The blind followers just seem to consider themselves to be
more patriotic, actually the only patriotic, citizens of a given
nation.

bb


Not much has changed in 103 years:

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the
largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the
matter-exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been
taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and
contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy
we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of
place-the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping.
This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
-- Mark Twain