We Have Become A Nation Of Pussies

I’m currently reading Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun” Though written primarily about World War I, for me it translates just as easily to Viet Nam.

I remember Viet Nam, I lived through the sixties and seventies and though I wasn’t old enough or mature enough to understand it in the early years I certainly gained understanding of it as I grew into my teens.

I remember Flower Children, Hippies, Beatniks and the then counter culture.  I remember Daniel Ellsberg, My Lai and Lt William Calley,  I remember Doctor King and I remember when the choice for young American men was go to jail or risk death in Viet Nam, that is unless you were politically connected like George W Bush.

I remember Jackson State and Kent State, The Weather Underground and SDS.

I remember sometimes on weekends after going out to dinner with my parents, I was maybe eight or nine and my dad would drive down Peachtree Street in Atlanta to “look at the hippies” he talked about what cowards they were because they weren’t willing to fight for freedom. How the peace sign was just the footprint of an American chicken. What he didn’t know was they were fighting for freedom, and any one of those flower children or hippies had more balls than my fellow Americans possess today.

When I look at the abuse that Americans suffer at the hands of our own government, TSA gropes, essential liberties suspended in so called wars on terror, drugs and whatever other dragon the government tells us needs slaying it makes me sick.  In the sixties and seventies, the peaceniks would have staged a full scale revolt, today we kneel at the feet of our oppressors and lick their boots, saying please protect me.

We should be ashamed.