Don’t Politicize Veterans’ Day!

Betty Little, our NY Dist. 45 State Senator , spoke Nov. 3 at a breakfast event honoring our veterans, sponsored by the Glens Falls Senior Center. She was the first speaker and in her first few minutes, she commented on how good it was to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, how important the flag is, and how protests surrounding the flag and the National Anthem are wrong.

I reacted so angrily that I left the event because I hadn’t understood until that moment how an issue becomes politicized and how twisted our national life has become. Politicization takes something that belongs to everyone and divides us by suggesting that the issue belongs to one political view or party. Politicians love to speak to and for veterans because the appeal is emotional, because so many of us have personal ties to one or more of the 380,000 who died in battle or from battle injuries since 1941. Mostly veterans are attractive to politicians because they constitute 22% of our population, a sizable voting bloc.

But Americans who have served or died in war included Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, and were of all colors. Such service and losses are not political. We hope that our soldiers fought and died for liberty and justice for all, for the values in our Constitution, including our freedom to protest against every sort of injustice. Our first amendment protects dissent and protest against our nation, flag, anthem and pledge. To be against protest is to be against freedom of speech, and threatens our democracy with tyranny.

Citizens tend to support politicians in time of war, even when our national response to world problems with military solutions is unwise. Patriotism is love of country and pride in our values and many accomplishments, which mostly are not military. Criticism of the NFL and other protesters may gain a politician some votes, but not honestly. Senator Little is entitled to her views about the flag and the NFL, but they have nothing to do with honoring veterans.

Since the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, the Republican party has claimed that opposing the use of military force for any purpose, is to oppose the United States and be against all who serve and have served. This has always been a lie. To want our nation to have a just and rational foreign policy is the highest kind of patriotism. Instead, we have had too much patriotism of the sort that encourages military service in support of bad policy, profiteering, and political gain.

Some in the military understand this, perhaps better than those of us who do not serve. A few years ago I heard the head of a local American Legion unit say, “Americans are willing to serve, but we want the cause to be just and the use of the military sensible.”

Once we enter a war, we cannot easily get out, so that wars perpetuate themselves. Walter Cronkite explained this once: “Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.” Few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it.

(A portion of this post was sent to The Chronicle, a weekly newspaper in Glens Falls NY.)