Every year I make the same tired jokes about Veterans Day. This is usually accompanied by a background anxiety that people will think me glib or insensitive about what people in the armed forces contribute. There are two things I have learned, though:
1) It is impossible to care about what is offending people that have a surface-level sense of humor
2) It is impossible for me to stop making idiotic jokes. No matter how much I want to.
When I was a boy, I wanted to join the Marine Corps. I investigated this option once I grew to the age of eighteen and it became clear that no college with a sentient human working the admissions process would admit me. Sadly, my life took me in a different direction, which, in case you were wondering, is a thing that craven cowards say when they are too spineless to admit their own spinelessness. I don't think a day goes by when I don't regret not going into the Corps. Do I make up for it by contributing to veterans causes? Lobby the government for better care for returning vets and the families of those killed in action? Buy a homeless vet a cup of coffee?
No. I'm an American. Despite a couple days that we set aside to say hollow niceties about people that put their lives on the line, we don't give a shit. We cut their benefits. We make sick jokes about the rampant PTSD caused by stretching a fighting force to it's breaking point. We allow callow, manipulative elected officials send them into nightmarish, unwinnable conflicts we have no business creating, aside from the very good business it will mean for some of their friends. We re-elect these same subhumans as if nothing had happened.
In a world where moral fiber is a devalued commodity, these are people willing to die for their principles. But we've watched our own government treat them as disposable and feed them into a meat grinder for so long that we have followed suit. It's enough to just click 'like' on a picture of men in uniform to 'Support Our Troops' as if that 'like' button will buy diapers for their children.
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