Yet another interview/profile of Larry Summers where the word “Epstein” never appears and where he’s never asked how many times he visited Epstein’s private island. I’m genuinely fascinated by how he’s *so* good at avoiding that question. https://t.co/xItFzoIgED
— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) June 25, 2021
There is a LOT in this seemingly innocuous question.
Am I the only one not surprised that rich people behaved like complete turds throughout the pandemic?
In study after study, the rich are shown to be less charitable, less empathic, and more likely to cheat, so bad behavior is the rule, not the exception:
Heather checked her phone when a text arrived from her mom saying her wealthy cousin from Los Angeles had just flown to Puerto Rico; it was his annual weeklong fishing trip with the boys and the pandemic wasn’t stopping them. He jetted off to stay in a private house with a chef, housekeeper, and fishing guides.
It was the peak of the pandemic in California, when 1 in 5 people in LA County were testing positive for COVID-19 in January, and Heather, who is a nurse and asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy, was working a busy shift. “I had double the amount of patients I was legally allowed and they were all on death’s doorstep,” she said.
………
As the pandemic revealed stark inequalities in American society, it also changed how many people view money and privilege. Sen. Ted Cruz was caught flying to Cancun while Texas buckled under both COVID and a power crisis during a deadly winter storm. Kim Kardashian hosted an island birthday romp for friends and family in Tahiti while the pandemic raged. They were just two of many wealthy people who were seen carelessly using their vast resources for their own pleasure rather than to help as millions struggled with the impacts of COVID: unemployment, displacement, poverty, and hunger. Meanwhile, essential workers like Heather stayed put to provide necessary services, sometimes for low wages.
………
Jacquelyn Delgado, a 53-year-old graduate student, said years of living in Mamaroneck, New York, an affluent area, prepared her for how the wealthy would respond in a crisis. “Rich people gonna rich people,” she told BuzzFeed News.
(Emphasis mine)
………
“I fully expected the wealthy to do what they always do,” said Delgado. “And it was the Trump era, so ‘Screw you, I got mine’ was just lived out loud.”
………
She’s not alone in seeing wealth impact her friendships. Sheeny Ng, a college student from Los Angeles, said a group of her high school friends started posting videos on Snapchat of their trip to Hawaii to celebrate a 21st birthday party before any of them had been vaccinated. “The wealthier ones are able to travel and not care whether it would impact low-income and marginalized communities that don’t have access to healthcare resources,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Wealth and money are so powerful, yet toxic,” she said.
………
Nikki, a 32-year-old teacher who lost her job because of the pandemic, watched in frustration as her siblings-in-law flew to Hawaii on the same day Los Angeles implemented a stay-at-home order. “They remind me of Daisy and Tom in Gatsby, not caring about the destruction they might leave in their wake,” said Nikki, who lives in San Diego and asked not to be identified by her full name. “I think the pandemic really actually unmasked us all,” she said. Nikki hasn’t allowed them to see her newborn baby due to safety concerns from their reckless travel.
(Emphasis mine)
………Watching people host parties maskless, eat indoors, and go to clubs while hundreds of thousands of people were dying and receiving little support from their government pushed Holly Bruneau, a 34-year-old from Minneapolis who works in nonprofits, deeper into progressive politics.
“I’ve always been a tree-hugging liberal, now I’m a pissed-off socialist,” she said.
Your mouth to God’s ear, Ms. Bruneau.
The Calvinist conflation of wealth and virtue has permeated the culture of the United States, and it’s an unalloyed evil.
F%$# the Pilgrims and their Plymouth Colony.
Carlette Duffy decided to get her home appraised, and though that her home was being low-balled because she was black, so, she got another appraisal and had a white friend pose as her brother, and that appraisal was more than double the previous two.
Even if you do all the right things, you pay just for the color of your skin, and this is a fact.
People who claim that racism is over because of Obama, or the Easter Bunny, or whatever, are full of crap:
A Black Indianapolis homeowner who had a nagging suspicion that her house was lowballed in two appraisals last year went to great lengths to conceal her race in a third. She removed photos of herself and her relatives and had a white friend pose as her brother for the appraiser’s home visit.
The result? The appraisal of Carlette Duffy’s home more than doubled.
Duffy’s home, which was assessed by different companies last year, was first appraised at $125,000, then $110,000 and finally $259,000 in November, according to the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana. The nonprofit announced this month that it had filed housing discrimination complaints on Duffy’s behalf with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
If you don’t think that bigotry and racism is an ongoing and pernicious problem, you are a hypocrite and a moron.
The New York Times editorial board is a font of conventional thinking. (Note that I did not say, “Wisdom.”)
You won’t find bold new or visionary ideas, but it is a good marker of where the conventional, “Wisdom,” is going, so their OP/ED calling for the end of qualified immunity for police officers might be an indication of a sea change in the elite consensus:
When a Minneapolis jury last month convicted the former police officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd on May 25, 2020, many Americans celebrated. At last, a moment of accountability, if not quite justice, in the face of persistent police brutality.
But for all the justified relief at the verdict, a troubling reality lurks: Had Mr. Chauvin not been criminally prosecuted — as the vast majority of police who kill in the line of duty are not — he may well have faced no consequences at all.
………
Qualified immunity arose out of an 1871 civil rights law that made government officials, including police officers, financially liable for violating a person’s constitutional rights. In a series of rulings starting in the late 1960s, the Supreme Court decided that an officer is immune from liability unless it can be shown that he or she broke “clearly established” law in the process. The burden is on the plaintiff to make this showing, and the bar is absurdly high: If no other court has previously ruled in a case involving an essentially identical set of facts, the law is determined to be not “clearly established.”
Examples of courts splitting hairs to give a pass to even egregious misconduct abound: the prison guard who pepper-sprayed an inmate in the face “for no reason at all”; the officer who fired at a nonthreatening dog and missed, accidentally hitting a 10-year-old child lying nearby on the ground; the officers who stole $225,000 in cash and rare coins while executing a search warrant; the officer who shot a 14-year-old boy after he had dropped a BB gun and raised his hands.
“I don’t think there’s any serious argument but that the qualified immunity doctrine as it currently exists is completely off the rails,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University and a founder of the Policing Project, which aims to give the general public a role in shaping law enforcement policy. “It makes no sense whatsoever and gives police officers far more leeway than they ought to have.”
In short, it’s hard to see what is qualified about qualified immunity.
………
In practice, qualified immunity has become what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called an “absolute shield” that “tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”
The court has also expressed the concern that individual cops will be bankrupted by judgments. This simply doesn’t happen. To the contrary, governments virtually always foot the bill for police wrongdoing. One study found that officers personally paid only .02 percent of the dollars that plaintiffs were awarded.
………
Ending or curtailing qualified immunity would not be a cure-all for police brutality. By the time it becomes an issue, the harm has already been done. While holding people and departments accountable is important, it’s even more important to ensure that the harm doesn’t occur in the first place. “Police misconduct is often a systemic problem. These are not just bad apples but bad barrels,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who studies police misconduct. “We should be thinking about how to reduce the harm, not just pay people.”
………
The more immediate solution is legislative. Congress is currently considering the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a far-reaching bill addressing racial discrimination and excessive force by law enforcement officers. One provision would eliminate the “clearly established” defense and prevent cops from relying on their own belief that their conduct was lawful. Unfortunately, that has become the bill’s main sticking point, as most Republicans have sided with police unions in opposing any liability for individual officers.
………
If the rule of law means anything, it means that those sworn to enforce it should not be above it.
The current state of policing int he United States is needlessly corrupt and brutal.
It must be reformed, and many, if not most, of its current members need to removed.
I
t is in fact true that Republican arguments against expanded unemployment insurance are straight out of Karl Marx.
Republicans are arguing that they need the fear of starvation and destitution to get jobs filled, just as Marx argued that capitalists needed the fear of starvation to exploit the proletariat.
There is symmetry:
Many Republican-controlled states are freaking out about the working class. Business owners, particularly of restaurants, are complaining they can’t find anyone to fill job openings, and conservative legislatures are leaping into action. At time of writing, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah have announced they will begin refusing the federal $300 supplement to unemployment benefits in the next few weeks, and more may follow. Utah has to “roll those back, to get more people into the workforce to get those jobs, to get back to employment,” said Governor Spencer Cox.
It is amusing to consider this development in light of the ongoing conservative panic attack over President Biden’s supposed “American Marxism” agenda, in the words of prominent right-wing radio host Mark Levin. Ironically, what Republicans are doing to the unemployed actually is explained by classic Marxism.
Let me explain. In his magnum opus Capital, Marx argued that a capitalist system will more-or-less automatically produce a population of surplus workers. Businesses become more productive through greater capital investment, which will require more workers in some areas but far fewer in others, and hence this process will always tend to to create an “industrial reserve army” of surplus labor — that is, the unemployed.
This reserve army is very important for classical capitalism. It “becomes … the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production.” The reason is that businesses are constantly changing the way they operate, and so always need a large supply of idle workers to fling into new projects on a moment’s notice:
The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. [Capital]
This really does not surprise me. The entire Neoliberal movement grew from Trotskyites.
That Republican thinking mirrors that of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin does not surprise me not one whit.
Jeff Bezos is a psychopath who revels in hurting people.
His ethos permeates Amazon, and it’s why you hear so many stories about the inhumanity of its workplace, not just in its warehouses, but in its corporate offices.
It turns out that Amazon gives its a mangers a quote of people to fire each year, which has led to a practice called, “Hire to Fire,” where they hire people for the express purpose of firing them in a few months so that they can hit their numbers.
Why does this world embrace sadists?
Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.
“We might hire people that we know we’re going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team,” one manager told Insider.
The practice is informally called “hire to fire,” in which managers hire people, internally or externally, they intend to fire within a year, just to help meet their annual turnover target, called unregretted attrition (URA). A manager’s URA target is the percentage of employees the company wouldn’t regret seeing leave, one way or the other.
………
The most senior executives at Amazon, including incoming CEO Andy Jassy, closely track their URA goals, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Jassy, for example, is expected to replace 6% of his division through “unregretted” departures on what appears to be an annual basis.
Something is deeply broken in our society.
I don’t know how to fix this. My only advice is that if you go postal at work, go after senior executives first.
Yale academics have written a study showing that Democratic Party anti-racism messaging harmed the party politically.
Obviously, some of the this can be ascribed to the racism of a portion of the electorate, but there is also the issue that anti-racism messaging has been offered as an alternative to basic issues of social justice, labor rights, and inequality.
That’s why Hillary Clinton’s, “Basket of Deplorables,” quote was so damaging.
The subtext was, “If you did not have the talent and initiative to get a post-graduate degree at an elite institution, screw you.”
The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has completely eschewed issues of socioeconomic class, because they are creatures of the top 1%, and racial reductionist statements allow them to check the various “social justice” text box while continue to serve the agenda of the economic elites.
The is the exact opposite of the answer that Jesse Jackson gave during his 1988 Presidential campaign when he was asked, “How you are going to get the support of the white steelworker?” and he replied, “By making him aware he has more in common with the black steel workers by being a worker, than with the boss by being white.”
Bernie Sanders message in 2016 and 2020 was very similar, and (thankfully) Biden appears to be governing more toward the Jackson end of the Democratic Party ideological spectrum than he is toward the Clinton/Obama side of the spectrum, even if he did not campaign that way:
Beginning about a decade ago, the Democratic Party went through two important changes related to racism. The first is that the backlash against Barack Obama made far more white liberals aware of how deeply racial resentment inspired American conservatism. (Black people had by and large realized this all along.)
The second is that the party, which in previous years had painstakingly avoided the impression its agenda was mainly designed to help minorities, began emphasizing this very point. That change occurred in 2016, when Hillary Clinton started infusing her rhetoric with conscious appeals to racial equity. And it continued in 2020 — even though Joe Biden employed less race-conscious rhetoric than his more progressive rivals, he still cast some of his plans as explicitly anti-racist.
But is it working? Yale political scientists Micah English and Josh Kalla have found that adding explicitly race-conscious ideas to Democratic messages reduces their support. English and Kalla’s experiment borrows real-world messages from Democratic politicians and tests them with both a race-conscious component and a mix of race and class messaging. In either instance, telling subjects that a proposal would reduce racial inequity makes them less likely to support it:
Bigotry is evil, and it needs to be fought on every level, but using anti-racist virtue signaling as an alternative to meaningful change in a profoundly dysfunctional society, ends up harming both the progressive project and the ability to fight racism, because it reduces every government action to a zero sum game where the only determinant is ethnicity.
It’s rather evocative, in an Adolph and Eva kind of way:
That shape looks familiar ……… Oh, right, it’s the Odal Rune, with wings, (Serifs) which was specifically created for:
Yes, it was worn on the lapels of some SS units in the 2nd World War, and is different from the historical Odal rune (ᛟ), which has no wings.
Here it is as the flag of the Flag of the Volksdeutsche 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, according to Wikipedia.
In recent years, actual NeoNazis have replaced the swastika with the winged Odal Rune in an attempt to mainstream their symboliam.
Also, I have some footage of the stage show at CPAC, and it’s a trip too:
Still, this is whole affair is a complete mind f%$#.
Over at the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell answers the burning question about millenials, “Why aren’t they getting married or buying houses, and why are they still living with their parents?”
Spoiler alert, it’s because they have crap jobs and they are up to their ears in debt, something which seems to escape all those sage analysts who have spilled barrels of ink over this:
Millennial homeownership rates are way, way down. And believe it or not, that’s probably a good thing.
………
Homeownership rates among Americans under age 35 are barely more than half the national number, at just 34.1 percent. This too is a record low and about a fifth below its peak from the go-go years of the mid-2000s.
………
Many colorful theories abound for millennials’ abandonment of homeownership. There are, for example, lots of think pieces about millennials’ purported love of the sharing economy and associated communitarian disavowal of all kinds of ownership — whether that be of houses, cars, bikes or even clothes.
But this explanation is wrong, at least when it comes to housing.
So why are young people delaying getting that deed?
One, they’re putting off getting married, which many still see as a prerequisite to homeownership. (Though a large chunk of millennials, I should note, instead view homeownership as a prerequisite to marriage.)
Two — and this is part of the reason they’re delaying marriage, too — is that they’re poor.
Relative to earlier generations, today’s cohort of young people is making less money, given their levels of education; more indebted with student loans; more likely to be underemployed; struggling harder to sock away savings; and facing shallower income-growth trajectories.
She’s right, and it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who isn’t busy yelling, “Hey, you kids get off my lawn!”
But for the average pundit, bemoaning the sad states of today’s youth is a an article that writes itself.
It’s catnip for hack writers.
I always knew the people who you know are the ones most likely to kill you.
I did not know this: (BTW, kickass discussion of statistics of incomplete data here)
Americans are afraid of many threats to their lives – serial killers, crazed gunmen, gang bangers, and above all terrorists – but these threats are surprisingly unlikely. Approximately three-quarters of all homicide victims in America are killed by someone they know. And the real threat from strangers is quite different from what most fear: one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.
Our law enforcement system is broken.
OK, that bit I knew.
I’ve not teased out all the reasons, but I have a profound and deep ambivalence about this Presidential campaign.
The last time I cared this little about a campaign, I was 6 years old, and living in a pre-oil boom Alaska (Humphrey-Nixon), and like most 6 year olds, I had only the vaguest understanding of the political process.
I’m still voting, but I’m probably writing in Vermin Supreme.
I am so glad that I live in a safe state where my vote does not count, because I cannot bring myself to care.
Research has found that gun fondling (the ammosexual life style) is closely associated with bigoted attitudes:
In America, support for some gun control policies, such as universal background checks, is above 90% percent, and yet mass shooting after mass shooting fails to incite action from politicians.
The popular explanation for this failure to act, so well evoked by commentators like Igor Volsky, is that the NRA has bought and paid for many politicians, who refuse to vote against their paymasters to support common sense gun control measures. And it’s true that the NRA has used its leverage and war chest to apply pressure to politicians and beat back gun control efforts
However, this NRA-centric narrative is inadequate to explain why efforts to control America’s gun violence epidemic keep failing.
Recently, we analyzed two separate data sources about Americans’ attitudes toward guns and gun control, and found that there is major, less-examined factor that influences the gun control debate: the racial identity and racial attitudes of gun owners, and those who support or oppose gun control legislation.
Put simply, America’s gun problem is a white supremacy problem in disguise.
This is not a surprise.
The modern history of gun control begins with restrictive gun legislation signed into law in California in the 1960s by Ronald Reagan.
It was in response to the open carry activism of the Black Panthers, which culminated with them walking into the state legislature packing heat.
The rather tepid Gun Control Act of 1968, followed California’s law, and this, along with white panic over the perceived threat of Black radicals led to the NRA going batsh%$ insane, and now we have a significant portion of our political process driven by the paranoid ammosexual movement.
This is so real. And an argument this is so completely evaded by leadership at Facebook and Twitter. pic.twitter.com/NOzS8TpWaC— ⤵︎ (@CodyBrown) June 24, 2016
I’m not sure if the folks at Facebook and Twitter consider this a feature or a bug, but to my mind it’s a bug.
H/t naked capitalism
First Uber has redefined it app to conceal when it charges surge prices to its users:
An Uber exec recently disclosed that the company knows when you are more likely to pay surge pricing. (It’s when your phone battery is just about to die.) But with a potential app change Uber is rolling out, this might not matter, because you probably won’t notice that surge is even in effect.
The app change, The Verge reports, would eliminate the blue-and-black circle that pops up before you hail a ride, letting you know that your trip will cost you two or three times what it usually does. On that screen, users also have to manually input the surge percentage, a sort of formal acknowledgement they know the ride will cost extra. (Like guac.)
Instead, now when you order a ride, you’ll see a set fare, a small line of text letting you know there’s an additional cost, and no second confirmation or indication of the surge multiplier.
Did you notice that especially evil bit there? It jacks up the rates when it knows that your battery is about to die? That is deeply evil on a level that buggers the mind:
Other than the company’s notoriously lax attitude about background checks, allegations of drivers kidnapping and raping riders, and that, um, interesting new logo, the worst thing about Uber is surge pricing. And, not surprisingly, the company has figured out exactly when you are more likely to pay double or triple the cost of your ride: when your phone battery is low.
This is a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation, which means that this is a company that our society (or at least our financial system) lionizes.
This is a particularly searing indictment of the values we hold as a society.
As Sanders Slams Wall Street Elite, Clinton Ditches Iowa To Fetch Their Checks
The issue is not whether Clinton is corrupt, she isn’t in any conventional sense.
It is rather that she, like Barack Obama, is one of them.
We have yet another article wondering why fewer people are getting drivers licenses these days:
………
Young people are not getting driver’s licenses so much anymore. In fact, no one is. According to a new study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the percentage of people with a driver’s license decreased between 2011 and 2014, across all age groups. For people aged 16 to 44, that percentage has been decreasing steadily since 1983.
It’s especially pronounced for the teens—in 2014, just 24.5 percent of 16-year-olds had a license, a 47-percent decrease from 1983, when 46.2 percent did. And at the tail end of the teen years, 69 percent of 19-year-olds had licenses in 2014, compared to 87.3 percent in 1983, a 21-percent decrease.
Among young adults, the declines are smaller but still significant—16.4 percent fewer 20-to-24-year-olds had licenses in 2014 than in 1983, 11 percent fewer 25-to-29-year-olds, 10.3 percent fewer 30-to-34-year-olds, and 7.4 percent fewer 35-to-39-year-olds. For people between 40 and 54, the declines were small, less than 5 percent.
………
Maybe it’s just that people today have more things they’d rather do than practice parallel parking between traffic cones. Or maybe it’s because the photos on those plastic cards are almost never flattering. Sivak and Schoettle are hoping to soon study possible reasons for the drop in driver’s licenses. But regardless of the cause, it seems that if you want to insult a teen today, shaming them for not being able to operate a motor vehicle might not be the way to go.
It’s not difficult to understand.
The FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) sector has been sitting athwart our economy sucking the marrow out of its bones for a very long time, and it appears that the insurance industry has finally reached a level where it’s breaking up America’s love affair with the automobile.
All in all, it’s king of a mixed emotions thing here. The insurance industry and auto industry have both done a lot to f%$# up our country.
If only they could both lose.
I just learned today that in Norway, the word “Texas: is slang for insanity, mayhem, and chaos:
Y’all already all know that Texas is known for its slang. The state is home to a slew of Southern colloquialisms as well as totally unique sayings you won’t hear anywhere else.
But did you know that the word “Texas” is in itself a slang word?
According to Texas Monthly, Norwegians have long used the word “Texas” in lieu of the word “crazy.”
Think that last statement is hogwash?
Just look at this headline from a Norwegian sports website, VG Sporten:
………
To explain the language phenomenon, Texas Monthly cited a Tumblr which claimed that Norwegian slang word has a lot to do with its association to the wild west and Western shoot-em-up movies. Another web travelogue we found on the internet explained it this way: “In Norwegian, ‘texas’ means mayhem and chaos, as in cowboys punching each other and breaking chairs over each other’s heads.”
In a Reddit string entitled “Norwegians on Texas,” one Reddit user wrote that when he uses the expression “Det var helt Texas,” he pictures a “cowboy crashing a party and shooting two revolvers into the air.”
It’s certainly not the most current of cultural references and can certainly lead to negative connotations, but it might be worth noting that the idiom is a largely old one. Some speculate that the idiom has been in use since at least the 1970s.
Considering my failed attempt to raise the term Snollygoster in the public consciousness, maybe it is time for me to start using “Totally Texas” for batsh%$ insane.
But here is the irony, here’s the thing that all the angry Black people know, and no calmly debating White people want to admit: The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.
I do not say this to diminish or demean the actions taken by members of the military, but rather because the boiler plate, “Thank you for your service,” is patronizing and demeaning.
What you are really saying, and the soldiers understand this, is “I am so glad that it’s you, and not me, or my children, who are doing this.”
Rather unsurprisingly, the folks who have served have a similar view of that cliche:
………
As the size of the military shrinks, the connections between military personnel and the broad civilian population appear to be growing more distant, the Pew Research Center concluded after a broad 2012 study of both service members and civilians.
Most of the country has experienced little, if any, personal impact from the longest era of war in U.S. history. But those in uniform have seen their lives upended by repeated deployments to war zones, felt the pain of seeing family members and comrades killed and maimed, and endured psychological trauma that many will carry forever, often invisible to their civilian neighbors.
………
“I am well-aware that many Americans, especially our elite classes, consider the military a bit like a guard dog,” said Lt. Col. Remi M. Hajjar, a professor of behavioral sciences and leadership at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“They are very thankful for our protection, but they probably wouldn’t want to have it as a neighbor,” he said. “And they certainly are not going to influence or inspire their own kids to join that pack of Rottweilers to protect America.”
………
George Baroff, enjoying an outdoor lunch at an organic food co-op in Carrboro one recent afternoon, said he understood the military quite well: He served three years as a draftee during World War II before eventually becoming a psychology professor in nearby Chapel Hill.
Baroff, 90, finds himself startled when people learn of his war record and say, as Americans often do to soldiers these days, “Thank you for your service.”
“You never, ever heard that in World War II. And the reason is, everybody served,” he said.
In Baroff’s view, today’s all-volunteer military has been robbed of the sense of shared sacrifice and national purpose that his generation enjoyed six decades ago. Today’s soldiers carry a heavier burden, he said, because the public has been disconnected from the universal responsibility and personal commitment required to fight and win wars.
“For us, the war was over in a few years. The enemy surrendered and were no longer a threat,” he said. “For soldiers today, the war is never over; the enemy is never defeated.” The result, he added, is “a state of perpetual anxiety that the rest of the country doesn’t experience.”
………
What most don’t realize is how frequently such gestures ring hollow.
“So many people give you lip service and offer fake sympathy. Their sons and daughters aren’t in the military, so it’s not their war. It’s something that happens to other people,” said Phillip Ruiz, 46, a former Army staff sergeant in Tennessee who was wounded twice during three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Douglas Pearce, a former Army lieutenant who fought in Afghanistan and is now a marriage and family counselor in Nashville, said civilians seem to think they “can assuage their guilt with five seconds in the airport.”
“What they’re saying is, ‘I’m glad you served so that I didn’t have to, and my kids won’t have to.‘”
(Emphasis mine)
Seriously, find something a bit more meaningful to say.
H/T Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly.
I’m not quite ready to add all reality TV Stars to my list, after all, one such star is now in the US Congress, but it does provide a rich vein of people who should (and will, at least by me) be ignored.
In my case, I am adding the whole Duggar clan to the list.
The problem here is not their choice of lifestyle, it is that we as a society watch this sh%$.
