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Outrage in Minnesota: Spurning Our Military Heroes
by Gary Larson

The liberal left's antipathy for the American military was on full display at Forest Lake High School after it banned Vets for Freedom following complaints from anti-war activists.

When a high school canceled a Vets for Freedom's educational program in Minnesota, the act drew public outrage. Not lost was the fact, a plain one at that: Professional educators often turn somersaults for the Left, perhaps their natural allies, and spring attacks on our military in schools across the nation. Besmirching our nation's military seems to be the rage in academia.

At Forest Lake (Minnesota) High School, officials nixed the vets' group's non-partisan national “heroes tour” aimed at creating awareness of what our nation's military is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. The vet group's leader, Lt. Peter Hegseth, is a native of Forest Lake (pop. 14,400). Featuring highly decorated vets of the war on terror, the event was long planned, anticipated, then canceled abruptly by school officials under unrelenting pressure from the hard Left.

A goodly number of educators sit with the liberal Left, no doubt a legacy (“gift”?) from Vietnam-era students now tenured professors. Their “Hell No, I Won't Go” of a generation ago, still resonates. Today they occupy positions of authority in schools, and deans' offices they once took over by force, and trashed. Their educational progeny, today's teachers (not all, certainly — nothing is 100%) inculcate a new generation of students to adopt, perhaps involuntarily, a dismissive, anti-military mindset. Americans in uniform are made out to be villains, somehow, thus targets of a disgustingly vicious, antiwar-at-any-price, liberal Democrat agenda. Anything goes?

Shades of Vietnam. Nearly 40 years ago, all over again. New war, same old hard Left. Still out to trash our extraordinary now all-volunteer military. Only back then, we vets returning “stateside” (or PCS) did not much speak out. Some of us, on the GI Bill, dared not to speak out, fearing grade reductions. Meanwhile, long-haired ear-ringed riffraff in the streets and on campuses, the self-centered “Hell No” crowd, hoisted VC flags, and chanted anti-war slogans, many in celebration of the enemy, a la Jane Fonda. In the vernacular of that day, it was “like crazy, man.”

We vets mostly talked among ourselves. Never in front of our professors. We knew better; we knew where they stood — with the ugly street's “peaceniks” a/k/a “refuseniks.” Nor did we speak to school assemblies. Based on what kids heard in the media (and from the ilk of John Kerry) we knew we'd be objects of derision, viewed with suspicion, as “baby killers.” Genghis Kahn-like. Lopping off ears. To the screeching anti-war mobs, we'd be the Enemy, for trying to bring freedom to forlorn South Vietnam. (Ironically, we knew — as probably even turncoat John Kerry knew — that “Charlie,” the VC, were the wanton killers in that far-off land, murdering village chiefs and schoolteachers. But facts do not matter to those stirring anti-war hysteria, or fleeing to Canada.)

Cowardice alone does not begin to account for the latest anti-military outbreak, this one in Minnesota, where the outspoken Vets for Freedom found an inhospitable reception. (Barred from the high school, they took their program at the 11th hour to the local American Legion post. Hundreds came to hear them, including kids skipping school. Never, it is reported, was “God Bless America” sung with as much gusto than at that American Legion club. Patriotism lives. (Thank YOU, American Legion.)

Anti-Americanism plays a huge role in the sneering at and trying to diminish our military. No more high school ROTC? No more military recruiters on campuses? Not a thing about military careers during career days? Blame it on the leftist anti-military brigades now patrolling our schools and their media allies, continually spewing new and God-awful myths about our military.

Flag-waving is passe, called jingoism. Still, Old Glory is worn proudly as shoulder patches of our military doing their duty with honor and self-sacrifice. Sometimes one might wonder, while our sturdy men and women in uniform protect us in the night, does a large segment of the public, particularly on the ideological Left, deserve such protection? Yes, the sun shines also on the unjust, and on the necessary idiots . . .

Something about the educational elite and its ideological kin, elite media, takes delight in whipping up a mob-like anti-military fervor. Claiming innocuously they “support the troops,” instead they subvert them, and their urgent missions, holding them up to ridicule. Now, heaping scorn upon them, some would deny them even free-speech rights other Americans routinely enjoy.

(In Minnesota, my home state, Democrats once actually tried to ban patriotic TV spots. The party of HHH, called the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party here, launched an attack on Iraqi War vets' free speech. Sadly, it's quite true. Go to my article if you doubt, “Tempest in a TV Spot: Attack on Veterans and Families of Our Fallen Heroes in Iraq.” Shame, shame on my state's once-noble DFL, now precursor to what happened in the muzzling in Forest Lake.

Our military does not get due credit, except on Memorial Day, for protecting us, and for the good they do in a nutty world. Instead they are made into straw-men, demons in effect, to be pummeled, perhaps for political gain. They are demeaned in ra-ta-tat fashion by the news media. (How many times did “news” of Abu Ghraib appear on the front page of the New York Times just prior to the last election? Fifty-six?)

How ghastly, how from bottom of the barrel, this latest outrage in Minnesota, denying its vets visiting with high school kids. School officials knowingly kowtowed to “protest” cries from (no kidding!) the “Democratic Underground.” It threatened — much like the Kansas church's assault on deceased GIs' families — to protest the Vets for Freedom educational program in Forest Lake. How very, very sad.

Our military deserves far, far better than being sandbagged by “useful idiots” in schools, or in the media. Something is terribly wrong when our sons and daughters, when they proudly don the uniform and serve in far-off lands, are spurned. Patriotism is on the wane, the victim of demagoguery (e.g., fanning hatred for a sitting president, in wartime, and urging a geopolitical defeat). What brings us to such a state? Self-loathing of a small self-centered group of Americans, writ large upon the military?

More outrages will follow, certainly, as an often hateful, unrepentant Left piles on our military, evidently its die-hard enemy, or a surrogate for same. The hard Left would (for reasons unfathomable to yours truly) sell out their country, demean its military. Why? Rough times await us, a new Vietnam era arising, with its all its shadowy anti-Americanism. God bless America, not damn it, and save it from defeatism and from hoping for its doom, as do “militants” chant on the Arab Street. And for heaven's sake, let's give our noble soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines their due, not sacrifice them on political altars. Is that too much to ask?

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