Oh shit. I never realized this.
This is a depressing reality every 4th of July.
So they go around the world bombing and killing people and then expect us to feel sorry for them?? Nah son, you deserve it.
me if i ever find out any of my neighbors are veterans
Hmmm. I mean, just because the army as an institution is flawed and damaging doesn’t mean everyone in it is a terrible person. To paint every single veteran with the same brush is reductive and to make light of the debilitating mental disorders many have just seems wrong. Like yes, fuck the military as an institution completely 100%, but blaming disabled ex-front-line infantry maybe isn’t the best direction for our anger, perhaps.
A lot of veterans are poor people who were intentionally targeted by scouting programs coming to their schools starting at age 13, and most of them are worse off coming back than they were to start with… let’s be courteous to folks with PTSD
Don’t be an ableist fuckface. Intentionally triggering someone is disgusting.
I thought people on this godforsaken website at least understood this one basic principal, but apparently not, so let me make it crystal clear:
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE SELECTIVELY PROGRESSIVE
You can hate Ann Coulter. But if you suggest that she deserves to be raped, you are a misogynist.
You can hate Woody Allen. But if you say he’s part of a Jewish conspiracy or joke about putting him in an oven, you are an antisemite.
You can hate Michael Vick. But you call for him to be lynched or call him the N-word, you are an anti-black racist.
You can hate Caitlyn Jenner. But if you misgender her, or make comments about her genitalia, you are a transphobe.
And you can hate the military. But if you deliberately try to trigger veterans with PTSD, you are an ableist piece of shit.
You do no get to pick and choose which people to treat fairly when it comes to acknowledging and combatting prejudice.
Not liking a person is not a free pass to disregard anti-prejudicial words and actions. Either you respect marginalized peoples as a whole (even if you don’t like an individual), or you don’t respect them at all. There is no middle ground.
If anyone really like, agrees with harassing veterans with PTSD or anything similar, unfollow me right the fuck now. I don’t want you following me.
You don’t have to like the military, it’s massively fucked up but y'all needs understand that most people in the military are victims of propaganda and are usually poor or part of a minority who are taken advantage of in order to join.
^^^ All of these comments tbh
Mhmm
They offered the ASVAB at my HIGH SCHOOL. They CAME INTO MY SCHOOL and said “If you guys take the military aptitude test, you get free donuts and you miss the first half of the day.” They brought in hot dogs. They brought food to a place where half of us were in poverty if not more, and they said, all you have to do is take a little test and you’ll get a snack, you don’t have to come in to school on time (an extra full hour of sleep that morning!). So we did. By the hundreds. My younger brother, a year behind me in school, scored “the highest we’ve ever seen in the whole damn state, son,” and for the next. Three. Fucking. Years. They harassed him. He got phone calls from every goddamn branch of the military. People would show up at our house at random, trying to recruit him. They’d tell him horror stories about how much better it is to enlist than be drafted (as if there’d been a draft in our lifetime!). They called our Mom at work. They sent recruiters to talk to our stepfather, who’d been in the Army, to try to get a handle on my brother’s weak points. THREE FUCKING YEARS OF THIS. My brother is the second child of six. My brother was thirteen by the time he had his own pillow for the first time. My brother was hungry all the time, dizzy from hunger some days–and oh, sidenote, my mother, stepfather and father are all abusive assholes who’d as soon hit you as look at you. Guess what year my brother graduated? If you guessed “May, 2002,” or “almost immediately after 9/11,” ding ding ding ding! The ONLY REASON my brother didn’t join the military, in the end, is that his girlfriend at the time said “If you enlist, I will never speak to you again.” Her dad was a military man, and he was also an abusive shithead, so in her head the two were inextricable. But if she’d said “go for it?” Or if she hadn’t said anything at all? Something like half of the males in my fucking graduating class enlisted. It was better than starving. And a great number of those are dead now. I hate the US military industry. I’m disgusted by the things our military does. But by god I don’t blame our veterans for what was done to them. Rich people don’t enlist. The ones who join the military are the ones who are hopeful that for once they’ll know that they’re getting a meal, not just today but tomorrow too.
Every damn point of the thread.
The soldiers are, by and large, as much a victim as anyone else.
Hate war but respect the poor soldiers fucked up by it
THIS.
I’m from a military family. My ancestors were members of the military in Germany in the 19th century, and when they finally immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century, a lot of the men went into the US Army, because it was tradition in my family. It still is. At least one guy from every section of my family has been in the military.
The ONLY FUCKING REASON I said “No” to the military early in life was because I could see the effects of it in the people around me. Both of my parents work at the VA in my hometown. I spent more time in a hospital as a young child than most people who don’t have health issues will in their first 30 years of life. And you know what I saw?
The effects of war. I saw veterans suffering from PTSD every day, yet they always put on a smile for me and tried to sugarcoat when I asked about the military because I was an 8 year old. At age 8, I was being steered away from the military by a bunch of people who had been victims of the US military, yet I still didn’t know how bad it could get.
And then my mom got transferred to the mental health ward of the VA, and I got my first look at what war really did to you. At age 12, I swore to myself that I would never go into the military, no matter what they offered me. I wasn’t going to be like the people I grew up around. Oh, they were lovely, kind individuals for the most part, but they’d warned me to not make their mistakes, and I agreed that I wouldn’t.
Oh yeah, I got recruitment officers. I was a band kid from a military family, of course I got just about every branch trying to convince me to join them. I said no every time.
I had to say no to a guaranteed paycheck that would allow me to play clarinet. I had to look a Marine officer dead in the eyes and tell him I’d rather risk not having the money for food than join the military. All because I grew up seeing what could happen to me if I had joined.
So really, be anti-war. Be anti-military. No one is saying you all can’t. But do NOT be a dick to veterans. There is so much at work here, and sometimes, you’re desperate, and the military has their ways of trying to convince you that they’re the best choice.
Hawkeye said it best. “War is war and hell is hell, but of the two, war is a lot worse.” Don’t be a dick. If someone has PTSD, don’t fucking set it off. Simple. It doesn’t matter if they’re a veteran or a survivor of abuse. If someone has PTSD, DO NOT SET THEM OFF.
I had no idea people even took the stand of “trigger veterans”. What duckers is this??
