If You Can't Say Something Nice, Say Something Good

Many of us in America over the age of 30 share a common shame, that of not handling the whole Viet Nam experience well. It was a time of huge social unrest. Paradigms weren’t shifting, they were being body slammed by a new reality that leadership and morality were not necessarily mutually inclusive. And as soldiers were returning from Viet Nam, Americans found that it was enormously difficult to separate the bad taste the war and its proponents had put in our mouths from those who had served there.
This was wrong.
In the context of the sixties, many a young man who enlisted to defend his country still heard the echo of James Cagney singing “I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy” while envisioning a photographer from Life Magazine snap the shutter just as he kisses a nurse “hello” on Victory in Viet Nam Day while ticker tape rains down and crowds cheer in admiration and gratitude.
That day never came.
Instead, soldiers were jeered at and attacked by anti-war demonstrators. They were called horrible names and accused of atrocities previously not discussed in civilized conversation in order to protect children and “the gentler sex.”
The title “hero” never came to most who served in Viet Nam and to add injury to injury….many returned with broken bodies and minds and were not given the care they so desperately needed.
This was wrong.
We know it and we wish we had handled it all better.
Which brings me to my point.
We are compounding our “bad” by allowing our corporate shame to shape American reaction to Iraq in 2004. We are so determined to “handle it better” that we are enduring, rationalizing, actually overlooking travesties of leadership, political manipulation, and documented dishonesty from our nation’s highest office.
And here's the lie that allows the lie: To do anything less would be to suggest that these brave people offered up life and limb for nothing.
How do you face the mother, father, spouse, child, or friend of a fallen soldier with that message? How do you even suggest it to a man or woman, husband or wife, son or daughter who is returning from that hell hole forever scarred by the sights and sounds of battle?
Based on the Viet Nam debacle, we dare not insult our country’s defenders. And so we hold our silence.
Our mothers’ voices collectively echo in our ears: “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all.”

This is so wrong.

Our “saying nothing” is shouting a message we will regret as deeply as we do our post-Viet Nam screw-ups.
We have been given the impression that our patriotism is directly linked to our approval of this war and our approval of this war is directly linked to our approval of those who are fighting it.
This is “fuzzy thinking” and it enslaves us in a haze of inaction.
I remind you that it is truth that will set us free.
Embracing the truth of unnecessary sacrifice could take us to a new day, a day in which those who have given up so much for so little would be shored up by the previously zip-lipped masses and together get really pissed off….pissed off enough to assume a new paradigm which says,
“There IS meaning to the sacrifices of time and family and innocence and life but it’s not the meaning assigned to them by the powers that are. The blood of our brothers and sisters cries out to us from the ground to say ‘No more, no more! Our sons and daughters will not be the currency of a war waged for opportunity, power, and the almighty dollar!’ One by one the lives of our soldiers count and they matter and they add up to one word and only one: 'ENOUGH!'”