When I saw a picture of Pat Tillman on the opinion page today, I assumed it would have something to do with the resignation of Rumsfeld and the failure of Buscho to complete EITHER war. But no. I live in Oklahoma, and should have known better. Today, a column was printed in my campus newspaper's opinion section, written by Mr. Royce Young. I won't comment further, except to indicate that the following is his column, deliniated by asterisks, and my response follows. I was limited to only 250 words so my response is not as thorough as I would have liked.
The column:
http://hub.ou.edu/articles/article.php?item_id=1564855125§ion_id=1774511018By Royce Young • The Oklahoma Daily
Posted 8:48 p.m., Nov. 9, 2006 E-Mail Article • Print Article • Post
November 6 was the birthday for a great American man. No, not Walter Johnson or John Philip Sousa.
This man is the face of heroism and symbolizes everything that is right with being an American.
I am talking about Pat Tillman (pictured).
Tillman left a lucrative contract in the NFL in 2002 to join the Army Rangers with his brother, Kevin.
He was killed April 22 in the Khost province of Afghanistan, the first NFL player to die in combat since the Vietnam War. He was 27.
He didn’t want recognition and didn’t want to be treated any differently because of who he was. He wanted to serve because he believed in his country.
Plain and simple: Tillman is a hero among heroes. He is what the United States is about: sacrifice for the good or, possibly, the bad of your country.
Tillman's decision to defend the U.S. symbolizes a stance that all Americans should adopt. It isn't about “supporting our troops.”
It is about supporting our country.
Sadly, we can't finish a war because of our political system. In WWII, the media was virtually nonexistent and we didn't have the extreme over-coverage of everything.
Now the media probe every facet of a war and the opposing political party uses it as fuel to their fire.
That, however, is the way it works. That is why we didn't close Vietnam when we were winning the darn thing. Because of our democratic political system, we just can't finish wars anymore.
One side of the political spectrum has an agenda — to win the next election. What better topic to take advantage of than a war?
Now we try to fight “nice” wars and make friends while we go so that the party that got us involved in the war can look as good as possible while soldiers and innocent people die.
Tragically, innocent people die in war. But bad people also die. That is just the name of the game.
Anything negative from Iraq or Afghanistan is plastered across the news, but rarely is anything positive. I have friends that have returned from Iraq and strangely, I didn't hear anything negative from them.
I was expecting to hear things about beating small children and killing mothers.
But in reality, all one friend told me about was building hospitals, schools and playgrounds, and how he was thanked by Iraqi citizens thousands of times.
Odd, isn't it? Why don't we ever hear that type of thing?
We need folks to suck it up, quit thinking about their own personal advancements and opinions and go win a war. If we get behind something together, we will finish the thing it and the world will be better off for it.
Tillman didn't care about his own ideology or political stance. He cared about his country. He was willing to put it all on the line for that and nothing else.
Why can't we all do the same? I understand people are going to disagree and they have every right to. But why does it have to be so divisive? Why does it have to be us versus them in our political world? It is hard to fight an enemy that hates you when your own team won't stand behind you.
Greedy people that only care about being elected push that type of negativity to us through the media. They are the ones that voted to go to war in the first place, but now want to get out because they know it is a sore spot with the American people.
I am not ready to wave the white flag because I believe that the good vastly outweighs the evil that has come from this war.
Pat Tillman is a symbol of hope and patriotism that seems to be dwindling in our land and I wish for its return because with its arrival would come the fire and guts that built the foundations of our land and forged us to the great nation that we are.
******
My response (I know it seems OBVIOUS to us, but apparently not all Olahomans have gotten it yet):
I wasn't surprised to find Pat Tillman being used as a poster boy to promote Mr. Young's pro-war agenda. The Bush administration, much to the dismay of Pat's mother, used him in a similar way and for the exact same reason.
Young describes Tillman as "a symbol of hope and patriotism." Pat was a patriot, but to use his story as pro-war propaganda is dishonest: Pat’s family describes him as a "fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq," which he called "f---ing illegal." Both Mr. Young and Mr. Bush have misrepresented Tillman, apparently without even trying to learn anything about the man. I wonder if Mr. Young still considers Tillman worthy of emulation. I do.
Young blames the democratic system and negative media coverage for Bush’s failures. In fact, it was the Bush administration that made the incomprehensible decision to essentially abandon the war in Afghanistan, where Tillman was killed, so that he could use the troops to invade Iraq on false pretenses. It was the Bush administration that disregarded pre-war advice that many more troops would be needed to secure Iraq. And it was the media that rallied public support for the war, regurgitating the Bush administration’s lies about WMDs and "mushroom clouds," even after it became clear that there never was such a threat. Mr. Tillman recognized this. Why doesn't Mr. Young?
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