Saturday, August 31, 2013

I'm Glad It Is Not My Decision ~ Ruth Ann Satchfield

Ruth Ann Satchfield:

"Except for those directly involved, there is no one who despises war more than I. However, whatever the President's decision about Syria, I will do my best to support it. It was not always that way, because it was my generation who fought the Vietnam War. That war was like Iraq, one in which we should have not been involved."
"I remember quite well the day my grandmother told me about coming to Texas in a covered wagon. It was 1962, and I was in high school. She was a child when she came, and it was a wagon train of friends and relatives. She told me then that a young couple traveling with them were Lyndon Johnson's parents, her cousins. Grandmother was a Bains/Bayne. I disliked him so much at the time, I didn't tell anyone for years. It was not his other politics that bothered me; I agreed with most of them. It was the war! After high school, I dated many young men from the helicopter-rescue training group in Mineral Wells. Many of those brave young men did not come back from Vietnam. What they had chosen to become was one of the most dangerous positions a man could choose. They knew their slim odds of making it back, but still chose to fight for the country they loved. Then the people who volunteered and those who were drafted came home and the country they loved treated them like dirt. It broke my heart." "This country has a love/hate relationship with war. In my youth, we watched Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, and other American westerns, and were led to believe the "good guys" always won. I have grown up, but there are still those in this country that have not. It seems they enjoy taking military personnel as if they were toy figures and moving them to fight in different theaters around the world. The problem is that they are not plastic figures but real, living human beings. Some of these people are the ones advising the president, and I can only hope that they are more compassionate and better-informed than Cheney and the rest who took us into Iraq. I feel that anyone who advises the president on military campaigns should have participated in war themselves, not gotten deferments like Cheney." "There are people who lie this country into war for their own benefit. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was more fiction than fact, and 50,000 of our service people died for that bit of fiction; more veterans are dying today from cancer, diabetes, and other diseases caused by that war. In Iraq, we lost 4488 people as of August 27, 2013, and are still counting. Iraq was based on lies about weapons of mass destruction. Right-wing politicians and pundits have made much of the fact that President Obama is taking his time checking everything out instead of closing his eyes and jumping into war with both feet, like President Bush. I, for one, appreciate the time and care he is taking in making this all-important decision." "I do not know upon what information President Obama will be making his decision, and neither do the majority of the people of this country. We are each entitled to our own opinions, just like I was when I disliked President Lyndon Johnson. I was wrong, and many of our uninformed decisions will be wrong now! I do know that if it were my children and grandchildren who were being killed with chemical weapons, I would not care who made them stop, just that someone did. It is too easy to place myself in their shoes. If you think of it that way, what would you do then? We are either a good compassionate nation or we are not."
"For those on the "right" who are so sure that war is the answer, and for those on the "left" who are so sure that it is not, the one thing I am sure of is that I am glad it is not my decision. Would you be so confident if it was yours?"

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