Cliches

I received this email last night:

Greetings!I've been follow troops morale and deployments and developments since the war began, and I've felt very upset about the ideas this country has about how best to "support the troops"...
As a social psych major in college, I spent a lot of time studying how good people can come to do bad things. And, unfortunately, war is the best petri dish for these kinds of occurences. Leave aside that I think the strategy in Iraq was flawed from the beginning, my concernis that the Administration continues to cut benefits and psychological support for the men and women defending our country. I think it's a disgrace that they will send soldiers overseas without proper equipment, under false pretense, and then, they won't even take responsibility when things go wrong.
Anyhow, I put my skills to use and made a 4-minute short film, and I built a website to provide information. I'd love for you to check itout and pass it along, if you think it holds any merit.
www.acatastrophicsuccess.com
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I wanted to share mine.
Cheers,Kaz

I followed the link and watched Kaz’s little cliché of an anti veteran film. It purports to be a psychological evaluation of a combat vet charged with murder. I’m sure they think they are being clever with the not so subtle ways that they make the vet look ignorant and brainwashed, but the effort was laughable. In the first few moments of the film, the “vet” refers to the president as “George Bush Jr” (because vets are too stupid to know the presidents real name). It heads downhill from there. I checked out the “learn” link on the page and was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find a page full of anti war links, running the gamut from MoveOn.org to Poets against the war.

One of the links led to “The Stanford Prison experiment”, detailing how dehumanizing the prison system in the U.S. is, and how it parallels the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners. This experiment lasted 6 days. I was particularly interested in a statement on the main page about how guards in the experiment became sadistic after only a few days of experimentation. Before I decided to make a real living, I spent 9 years as a Corrections Officer. I worked in a segregation unit for most of that time. I also worked on the security squad and was a SORT (Special Operations Response Team) member. If anyone was in a position to become a sadistic thug, it was me. I won’t pretend for a moment that I wasn’t changed by my experience “doing time part time”, but I certainly wasn’t turned into some kind of sadistic monster. Psychological evaluations prior to hiring, weeks of training prior to inmate contact and ongoing training while working prevent this sort of devolution. Before anyone disparages Corrections Officers, they need to walk a tier, alone and unarmed, among a couple of hundred felons.

This is how the anti war crowd discounts the inconvenient reality of troops who believe in their mission; depict them as ignoramuses, or worse, as Psychos. Another favored tactic is to call them liars, like this little gem over at Huffington. I have no problem at all with those who disagree with the war, so long as they thank a veteran for the right to do so, but I have a big problem with the idiots who paint us with these stereotypes. If you believe the war is wrong, fine. Don’t pretend for a second that you are supporting the troops by calling them stupid insane liars.

If you believe the war is wrong but honestly want to support the troops by getting them home, here is what you can do: find a charity that is helping the children of Iraq and Afghanistan by providing medical care, school supplies, clothing, or shelter. They are out there. Donate to them. Send me an email or comment with a link to the charity; I will build a Blogroll of them. Everybody wins.

One more note to Kaz: Spell check, Grammar check, read it out loud to see if it makes sense, and then hit send. Oh, and put down the Kool-Aid.