I admit that my articulation can be strung out a bit because there are a lot of points to bring up regarding this topic. Plus I’ve been getting Harped on for the last day about this and it gets exhausting at a point.

Regardless, in hindsight, I think it was a stupid thing for me to try and argue. It is obviously true that veterans should be welcome on the left and that we should understand the material conditions that effect people’s decisions to enlist without making personal responsibility arguments in the same way we don’t treat criminality or drug abuse as an issue of personal responsibility.

This is the takeaway I am trying to get people to understand. That’s it’s a complicated issue that is larger than “I want to kill people” for many who enlist.