Why I Support Trump.

 It's probably hard for loved ones still coming to terms, all these years later, with the fact that their loved ones died and were crippled in meaningless wars that served no strategic national interest.  That their boys, and girls, were often but pawns in the war-making machinery that led to their meaningless early deaths.

I come from a generation, and a family, that emphasized brainwork, not "bravery" and brawn. Reason and intelligence over belligerence and bullying. Good Books over guns and bombs and the flashy power of shock and awe. Quiet comfort, modest long-lived lives over the bull roar and early rot of young bodies...

In my day, the young men who enlisted had few other options:  they were not students, likely could not find a suitable entry-level position, and entered the military as a last resort.  They needed personal leadership -- to be led -- and the accompanying government security of government preference points and extra help that their service status conferred.

As technology replaces more and more of the manpower needed in the military, as we have wised up to the need for only "get in, get out" defensive actions in the name of national security -- and less personal sacrifice to serve the interests of other players in other countries -- I am sure it is hard to take the blinders off and accept that our military men, and women, once cloaked in glory and "bravery" and self sacrifice -- were indeed often the pawns of poorer people who could not afford for them higher education, a life of the mind, or an independent life of their own.

God bless them today, but let's not continue to defend their deaths as meaningful, nor their long-lasting injuries and illnesses as noble badges.  Most of us learned from VietNam how men can be manipulated, and how... if many had to do it all over again, they might have tried to be stronger and craft lives of their own that went longer, deeper and were more meaningful that simply serving as animal-like sacrifices in the days of old.

Death and maiming don't make Americans great -- neither outbound nor internally.  That's but another truth that most of us have learned, and refuse to be cowed into playing along with.  The years without war are better for a nation -- that is why President Trump will be elected again in November, and why the Bushes, Cheneys, McCains and their enablers (and allll the Dem politicos who went along to get along in the war years) sat out this year's Republican convention.

Good riddance.  Unlike those still remembered and mourned in the hearts of their loves ones still struggling all these years on to calculate the price their own flesh and blood paid for...   what exactly again? No amount of chest beating, rhetorical flourishes or flag waving can make them whole again, sadly.

#IStandWiththePresident

#NoMoreMeaninglessWars 

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ADDED:  From the NYT propaganda rag, an editorial headline:

Dana Canedy

My Son Knows His Father Wasn’t a ‘Loser’ or a ‘Sucker’ 

Sadly though, the boy does not know his father at all, except through the fog of memory, and the stories puffed and shared about him. These children do not know their parents as men and women who are among the living, because they have been unduly sacrificed. No amount of NYT stories in the scrapbook can replace a living father, or mother, sacrificed in wartime. Let the child speak for himself later in life because his father no longer can. Was the price paid worth the loss of a living parent sheperding a childhood, providing for his own offspring, not the promise of... building schools for girls abraod, or destabilitizing other nations for the elusive promise of peace? When our journalists at formerly prominent publications stop asking hard questions and start simply swallowing lies and myths, we need a stronger class of Americans to step up. No guns needed; wisdom does not come with a trigger or flash, not that kind of weaponry... Truth be told? The child's father met his son only once -- killed when his Humvee rolled over a defensive landmine on the side of an Iraqi road. He had no legal committment to the Baby Mama who paints their bond so thick with her words in the NYT, and likely would not have been present in his child's life in a highly visible way, had the father lived. Myths. One day, the child will likely question them, and come to understand why exactly he was raised without a father, wearing his mother's name -- (a Canedy, not a King) -- instead. Lo and behold, the mother is exploiting the dead soldier's alleged fatherhood tales for monetary gain. Mother Raises Son With Father's Wisdom: Mother keeps father's memory alive for her son through his wartime journal. Nothing but pity here for the sons of single moms thinking they can replace a dead father with their own inflated memories and words of masculine wisdome. Dead, not in glorious combat even, but after rolling over a roadside bomb in a failed attempt to "liberate" another nation's peoples. Sad.