I never seen to be able to get them on board. It's not like I do it often, but the few times I've tried recently they just don't get it

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I always open up with how it fucked up my friends and their families. When I was a boy I worked for a woman pulling weeds and clearing her garden bed and digging irrigation ditches. Her father was a veteran of WWII, "the good war" as people like to think of it. She told me once that nobody could wake her father up by touching him. If you were within striking distance he would wake up throwing punches and trying to kill you. Even if you were his 10 year old daughter.

    They would wake him up by grabbing a toe and leaving the room.

    This was also a man who, if the stories are true, was among a couple dozen soldiers who blockaded some trucks at gunpoint so they could offload food supplies to the concentration camp they had just liberated. If all of that is true imagine the lives he saved. Imagine how much "good" he did with his time at war. And it still fucked him up until the day he died.

    Once you get them onboard with the horror of war you can start to dismantle their ideas about the need for a military. It is disgusting that it takes PTSD riddled soldiers to get people to understand how bad war is and not the victims who died nameless under their guns. It really is awful that it takes soldiers coming home as broken humans for people to understand "war is bad." But, if that's the only angle you can work with you should use it. These are libs, afterall.

    • SerLava [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      That personal experience is a lib cheat code, they must be scared to interrupt

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It plays upon the "respect the troops" narrative and it can be effective. If even "the good wars" send broken men home it challenges a lot of their assumptions.

    • spectre [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Also toss in how combat troops are generally 17-24 year old men. Idk if the US skews much higher, but they're generally quite young and getting permanently fucked up over what's usually almost nothing (not to mention the "other side")

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Right? The frontal lobe doesn't really finish developing in the human brain until your mid 20s.

        "Young, dumb, and full of cum" isn't an enduring line about the state of enlistees for no reason.