How much is your child's life worth? Is it worth taking the chance for a $20,000 enlistment bonus?
Almost four thousand of our men and women have died in Iraq and as many as 200,00 have been wounded.
We don't see those pictures of the body bags taken off the military planes, or the soldiers deaths in Iraq, or footage of the wounded getting help. Why is that? Vietnam was a bloody war and we had to watch it. The news stations made it real for us. We saw napalm burning, Buddhists setting themselves on fire, the medivac helicopters carrying wounded US soldiers.
We learned the vocabulary of war and we were very aware of the sacrifices being made-and we said enough...
Today the only US citizens aware of the price of war are those who have lost family members-those deaths are real.
The rest of us have the luxury of the Bush media spin machine which keeps reality from our doorstep. Of cooperating news agencies willing to soft pedal the reality of the death and maiming war creates. We all want it-so we go along. Oh we grumble-grumble grumble...big deal..
I walked into my daughter's high school at the end of the year for a meeting. I looked around the front lobby of the school and posted, big posters-recruitment posters for the armed forces.
This school has a primarily African American and Hispanic population.
I'll bet those $20,000 bonuses look mighty good to poor struggling families. Like money they would ever acquire in a lifetime.
So who do you think those bonus bucks are set up to lure? Which socioeconomic group do you think will take the Armed Forces up on this once in a lifetime chunk of money?
Shame on them. Shame, shame and more shame.
We fight this war on the backs of the poor and the minorities in our country.
Let's have Mitt Romney's boys sign up for that bonus or some of the others in Congress-
It makes me feel sick in my heart. Sick in my heart and such a sense of sadness.
