It warms my little Cherokee heart. ;-D

Thank you, moat!

Perfect.

I encourage any and all opinions, and Lord knows, when it comes to war, progressives get whipped up pretty quick.

But in this case, my motivation was to reach out to those readers who may have veterans in their families, neighborhoods or among their friends; who may not have military backgrounds, who may not know how to reach out to them, who may even wonder if what they see on the news and in the movies tells the whole picture of what goes on in the minds of vets.

I wanted to reach out to them and say, hey, they're not so scary. Just be their friend. You can help them adjust just by reaching out to them.

This was all I was trying to do with this blogpost.

I do not argue with the point that ending war would end the need to even worry about having veterans; but I have to deal with the reality we have before us, which is that we do have two ongoing wars, right now. That is our reality.

And of course I think there is ALWAYS more our government can do to help our returning vets, and don't even get me started on what I think about the fact that Walter Reed seemed to think it was a good idea to have a man counseling vets with PTSD who did not want to be in the army, who opposed both wars, who had poor performance evaluations, and who was showing severe signs of stress in his own life.

That said--this wasn't about any of those things.

This was about men and women like my son and my husband, who came home from wars feeling the same way Odysseus must have felt thousands of years ago, and who appreciated small acts of kindness offered them by strangers.

Veteran's Day is coming up, you know.

(heaving gigantic sigh)

OF COURSE NOT

All I am saying is that, we, as civilians who would like to reach out to our veterans but who may not know exactly how to go about it, who may not have a military background and who may feel awkward in their presence...

Just read the post again, my dear. I am not implying that the government should not do its due diligence to the veterans, not by any means.

I'm simply addressing those of us who would like to reach out to veterans in our neighbohorhoods or families and might not know how.

Geez.

Sorry.

I'm discussing the men and women who have fought bravely, returned home, and are striving to live their lives quietly and successfully with their families, and what we can do to help them do that.

If you want to argue the war in Afghanistan, I have written other posts on that subject; by all means, go find my other posts on the war, and I'll argue with you there.

This is about the warriors, not the war, and it is about how we can help them adjust, regardless of how we feel about the war itself.

I'm sorry if you somehow missed that point, because it means that somehow I failed to make it.

At no point did I mention "winning" or "losing" the war; simply helping our men and women adjust to civilian life once they transition out of the armed forces.

Again, find another post on the war to re-fight it.

Besides that, the tribal complexities are such that, if you take Afghan army or police into areas of opposing tribes, they consider them to be an occupying force as if they were Americans, and so they have to recruit more members from those tribes, and so on and so on.

This situation is deeply, deeply complex, and I find much of the arguments on the right to be highly simplistic.

What you talk about is to basically build an entire country from scratch, and don't forget, we not only have to train their forces, but uniform them, house them, feed them, and pay them--indefinitely as well. We have to basically support that whole country, plus build schools for them and hospitals and roads, etc., while fighting the Taliban for them.

The American people are in no mood, and the president must weigh this along with the general's request.

Please don't think that I disagree that these troops are needed. I have a military mindset, and I have spent 8 years GRIEVING for those guys out there who have been left to ROT on rocky isolated mountains, sometimes without even enough WATER.

But NOW, after eight years...see, in order to secure this country, we have to HOLD our gains, and that means, hold them maybe for decades.

And in order to do that in a way that is going to be palatable and affordable as well to the American people, and do it in a way that, frankly, the military can tolerate without just flat-out winding up broken after 8 years of war in two lands without a draft--we are going to have to make some tough compromises and some tough choices.

Even McChrystal knows that. This is why we may have to hold our noses and make some deals with some less odious tribes of the Taliban. This is why we may have to pull back from the countryside and give up some of the small villages in order to secure, say, Kandahar.

We just don't have enough to go around anymore, and that is the stark truth. Tough choices have to be made, and many of the president's harshest critics on the right wing seem to suffer from an alarming case of amnesia--they seem to be forgetting all about the previous eight years.

Perhaps one point I neglected to make and should have is that SF people tend to think, not in YEARS, but in DECADES. Once you send in 40,000 troops to take a certain area or whatever, those troops will be there to stay indefinitely to hold that area, as you point out...for how long?

Two years? Ten years? Twenty years?

How long can we afford it? How long can our troops, some of whom have already done multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan already, continue to stay?

It's not as easy as it sounds.

I'll check that out, and pass on your comment to folks on my e-mail list, as well, who I think would appreciate it as well.

I wasn't familiar with Franklin's work, but will be soon, thanks to you.

Deanie

I mean, if they'd just THINK for a minute...

(Not that thought has anything to do with it...)

To allowe the discussion to get TOO sidetracked onto racism and off of health care so that health care gets derailed would hurt those who are already the most hurt BY racism. That's why it's important that we not lose focus.

That said, it doesn't mean that we should remain silent.

Dickday--my heart aches for your daughter, and I know the pressure--first-hand--that she felt (not from my in-laws, tho). Getting up and walking from the room was probably the loudest--and bravest--thing she could have said.

Wendy, I think what frustrates you is the difference between Obama the idealist--what he would LOVE to do if he could just come into office, wave a magic wand and make things happen--and Obama the pragmatist, who must deal with, first of all, a party with many different facets of its own, from San Francisco liberal to Montana conservative to Maine moderate and all levels in-between; then he has to deal with two lionesque senators either now-deceased or too ill to be present most of the time, and an opposition party determined to shut him completely down. Within that construct, he can't do everything he would love to do; he just can't. He has to find a practical middle, and it frustrates just about everybody, including himself. That's life in the Big House.

Ramona, no, I wasn't necessarily going to write about Grandmother, but my kids want me to write a book about how this city girl wound up married to a cowboy, living on a sprawling ranch in west Texas where he was a "hand" back in the '70's (the kind of place where they measure land by the square mile). I'm told they took bets at the wedding as to how quickly I'd come running back, if not to mama, then at least to civilization.

That was 35 years ago. Looks like I won the bet. ;-D

I'm dragging my feet because I don't know if anybody other than my two kids would be interested in reading a book like that.

What do you guys think?

And how can we learn what kind of person someone is if we can't peruse their shelves on a visit? Or, conversely, stand blankly, staring at their huge TV and taking note of the fact that they HAVE no books? (she said with a wry smile.)

(I knew we'd get distracted with that, but it's a good distraction!)

My friend's daughter wasn't being mean--she was just very busy and had only just posted the website. Her parents live in a small town where most of their customers DO, er, "do computers." I think they'll start "doing" computers before long...I predict about the time a grandchild makes an appearance!

My grandmother. You do not know the half of it! One of her talents was the ability to "shoot the toe." YOu know. Like people "shoot the finger." Her middle toe. She'd take off her shoe and...What a great broad she was.

She signed her letters: Grand Mother.

I believe that's how she saw herself, which was perfectly fine with me. I miss her to this day.

The technological changes that I described are merely emblematic, I think, of greater cultural changes across the board that many people find threatening--to encompass gay marriage, the sexual freedoms of young people, and so forth. Also the reordering of the world order, in that, the loss of SuperPower Standoffs, the rise of China, the threats of non-nation terrorist cells, and so on.

They're just afraid. Bush comforted them because he responded to those threats--real and imagined--in familiar ways. What they refused to see was that those responses, in fact, made things much more dangerous, not less. They will never understand Obama's approach to diplomacy, even though his is far more nuanced and intelligent and, in the long run, safer.

No, it's the economy, more than anything else. Firearms are very expensive, and people just can't afford to buy them right now in the numbers they could when this graph first went up. But gun-owners are notorious hoarders and true enthusiasts rarely own only one.

I have one friend who, when he moved once, had to get his ammunition into his new garage stacked up on a dolly. If he had that much ammo, you do the math as to how many guns he owned.

I know someone else who kept a machine gun under his bed, and he had small children in the home.

(I live in TX. Need I say more?)