[{ "name": "Ad - Medium Rectangle CC01 - 300x250", "id": "AdMediumRectangleCC01300x250", "class": "inlineCenter", "insertPoint": "8", "component": "2963441", "requiredCountToDisplay": "12" },{ "name": "Ad - Medium Rectangle LC01 - 300x250", "id": "AdMediumRectangleCC01300x250", "class": "inlineCenter", "insertPoint": "18", "component": "2963441", "requiredCountToDisplay": "22" },{ "name": "Ad - Medium Rectangle LC09 - 300x250", "id": "AdMediumRectangleLC09300x250", "class": "inlineCenter", "insertPoint": "28", "component": "3252660", "requiredCountToDisplay": "32" }]
Although I am glad that these women banded together for a cause, I am disappointed that they chose this cause, and disappointed that New Times runs stinted editorials like this (“Whatever happened to Code Pink?” April 19).
First and foremost, I was there in Iraq during the invasion, and have returned since, and hold that if you didn't go, you don't know. You don't know what war is like, what the smell of burning flesh and gunpowder is like, what bullets do to bodies—and I hope you never will. While you were safe at home or having a beer at the Frog and Peach, we were praying we'd all see the next sunrise. While you were protesting the war between bites of your Pig from Firestone, we were wondering if we'd have a meal that day at all.
Whether the war was or is "legal" is a question for actual lawyers and judges—not activists or philosophers. Whether the war was moral is another issue entirely; how can you judge its morality if you weren't there to be thanked over and over by the people who lined the streets, welcoming us much like the liberating heroes in Paris of World War II?
If the cause that these women were coming together in support of had long-term merit, perhaps they would have found the same intestinal fortitude that service members who continue to reenlist share; serving in the face of deployments to hostile lands and the fading support of our nation.
But go ahead and protest the war, all these years later, long after the dictator has been deposed, tried, convicted, and executed; continue to preen of your glory days as social activists, because, in reality, you didn't go, you don't know, and ultimately you can't understand what it's like. So bang your drums and point your fingers. Drop your underwear in the streets—as if that is actually going to accomplish anything at all in a blatantly apathetic society.