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| I Am Not Having a Crisis |
| 2008-09-11 |
| I am unusual, apparently. It's not because I am a coffeehouse dweller, or an NPR listener, or prone to wear loafers with jeans. In the world I inhabited until recently, all of these are quite normal. Rather, it is that I am also a field artillery officer in the U.S. Army. Which places me in that subdemographic of New York lawyers who wear suits and work in office buildings until they decide to join the military and blow things up. (Trust me, there are some; just not many.) For this decision, I now endure lingering looks of concern from people who care about me. I knew that friends and colleagues would be surprised. Prior to 2004, the year I left for basic training, I had shown no tendency toward reckless acts like joining the military. Nor did my colleagues know that members of my family had, in previous generations, routinely done stints in the armed services during times of national need. So I was prepared for a certain range of responses in New York, from puzzlement to backslapping support to outrage. What I wasn't prepared for was the quality of some people's reactions--not simply surprise or distress, but something deeper and more permanent. People I had known for years started behaving differently toward me. This is a tough thing to put your finger on--but you can sense it. You can tell when you are being discussed, when people are trying to decide if they know you as well as they had thought. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #4 Note too the Captain went Combat Arms and not JAG per his education. JFK and his generation would have understood but the relationship of Joe Lieberman to the Democratic Party shows where the Dems are now. |
| Posted by: tipover 2008-09-11 14:25 |
| #3 Seriously, those people are NOT your friends, Dump them. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2008-09-11 13:29 |
| #2 People I had known for years started behaving differently toward me Think in their terms, you are now a dangerous Baby-killer. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2008-09-11 13:23 |
| #1 No, at the end of the day, the issue was simply that I had joined the military. Just understand in our society where there are words to define racists and sexists and anti-Semitic, the language has yet to coin a descriptive to tag those with a gut level intolerance and bigotry towards those who serve. The word may not be there yet, but the condition has been there for a long time. And for some reason it correlates to those maps with color coded boundaries of counties and elections. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-09-11 10:57 |