Slap that yellow ribbon on your SUV

By MN Against Bush


Do you want to show your support of our troops? Well it is simple to do, simply slap a yellow ribbon on your SUV and you can show just how much you appreciate watching those troops get their limbs blown up in the war that you sit at home and watch on Fox News for entertainment.

If you show off your ribbon you will be showing our troops plenty support, and you can feel comfortable defending keeping them in Iraq for years to come. You don't have to worry about the fact that many of them want nothing more than to be able to go home and be with their families, you can just pretend that the best way to support them is to keep them there longer. You can sit and watch as they are forced to kill and be killed in a war that many of them don't even support, because as long as you say you support the troops you can put them through whatever hell your ideology creates.

It doesn't matter that many of the young men and women who are in the military are there because they enlisted on the basis of misconceptions. Here they were being pummeled with television ads showing the members of our armed forces being promoted to hero status, and assured them that if they would only enlist they could be a hero too. Everybody wants to be a hero, and so many people listed out of a great sense of civic duty. But they were never shown what it is really like to be in the military in those ads. They never showed images of people having their friends blown up by bombs in those ads, they never showed a child crying when they learned their daddy was killed, they never showed the people who came back from war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they were only showed the hero worship. Many people wanted be heroes, but once they signed on the dotted line there was no going back. All of a sudden they were being sent into an illegal war and being forced to fight for a lie. If they backed out they would be sent to prison and have their lives destroyed, and so their families were ripped apart and they were forced to fight for the lie.

They fought for the lie in large part because they had no choice and were lied to about the reality of war. And they watched helplessly as their friends get killed, they watched helplessly as civilians died needlessly, and they watched helplessly as the blood squirt from the stump that remained of their leg after they got too close to a roadside bomb. And then they were they sent off to be treated for their injuries within the confines of the mold encrusted walls of Walter Reed.

But you can forget about all that, because all it takes to support the troops is to slap that yellow ribbon on your SUV. If you say you support the troops then you can go right ahead and vote for politicians that will cut their benefits, extend their tours, and get them sent home in coffins. As long as you have the yellow ribbon you can excuse anything.

So drive around with your yellow ribbon, watch your Fox News, and pump your fist wildly in the air as you scream "USA! USA! USA!" As long as you pretend to be really enthusiastic about supporting the troops you don't have to worry about bringing them home from the war they are being killed off in.

Are you proud to be an American right now or what?


Posted in full with author's permission.

Originally posted at democraticunderground.com: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MN%20Against%20Bush/134