ClaecElric4God wrote:It's Remembrance Day in Canada, which is basically the equivalent of our Memorial Day. Ren's the one who made this thread, and he's Canadian, so....
Well then I learned something today!
Also, I know you're just joking and whatnot, but I don't particularly feel that it's in good taste to make light of a day like this, even if you didn't take your military service seriously. But maybe that's just me.
I took my service very seriously, you kind of can't take the military light-hearted for a lot of reasons. But no matter how serious I took it it didn't change the fact that standing 6/6 watch underway was hell, and that people would immediately call the rewind shop the second a bulb burned out because they were too lazy to replace it, which wasted our time for stuff that was actually important.
I'm not making light of it. I'm just sick and jaded by people who praise servicemembers/veterans and then turn around and treat us like crap with their politics. I'm not saying that's you, I'm just tired of seeing political cartoons from known jerks who are like "Thank you for your service" but want to hurt us in very real ways with the views they espouse. I'm not a hero. I'm a person who didn't know what to do after high school and thought the military was my best bet. There are a lot of other people like that that I know. Filipino guys who wanted American citizenship and knew that joining the Navy was a quick path to it, or people who were just joining for the sweet GI Bill money, and even a couple of people who were hardcore racists and just wanted an excuse to kill brown people in the Middle East.
I'm not trying to bash people who served. I knew some great people in the Navy, and there were of course the guys who wanted to serve their country, to give back in some way to the place they grew up in. I'm not even saying you have to view veterans or military folk with disdain, or that you can't be proud of what they're doing, or that you have to say "Well they're just people." This is CAA, I can't really rant like I'd like to, so I won't.
But I will say: if you think veterans are good, if you think they deserve praise, if you think they deserve honors for what they did, please remember a lot of veterans have problems when they get out of the service. Remember that a lot of veterans are poor, and struggle to make a living. Please don't support things that hurt the veterans who are living in poverty and need help to survive.