Why I can’t vote for Kerry
We live in a world of mixed messages, most of them originating in our own culture. This flip-flopping has greatly weakened our country, because much of the rest of the world doesn’t grant the forgiveness that we so willingly offer.
For example, let’s step way back from life for a minute and take a look at the raising of our children here in the good old USA.
We teach our children that honesty matters, but the dishonest are rewarded in the adult world. We tell our kids to “just say no,” while we suck on cancer sticks and get drunk every night. We want to tell others that the problem with their children is that they don’t spend enough time with them, and we do so while taking our own kids from aftercare to soccer practice to piano lessons. Like the Apostle Paul, we know what’s right but we do what’s wrong. And since we do what’s wrong, we assume everybody else is doing likewise. Our mixed messages are more about them than us.
We tell our kids to study hard but shrink in fear when new technologies come our way. We bitch and complain about the way things are done in our communities, but we don’t get involved. Instead of helping to fight crime, we move away from it.
It will come as a shock to most of my friends that I’m not voting for John Kerry, and it’s due to the issue of mixed messages. A man opposed to war simply cannot fight one, and I want no part of that mixed message, because I think we ARE at war.
I’m liberal in most ways and conservative in some, but ideology has nothing to do with this decision. I also have roots as a Democrat, but the party has changed so much that I’m not swayed by that kind of loyalty anymore. Being a liberal today is much different than it was in my youth.
I think we need change in Washington and especially in the White House, but I cannot bring myself to support the Democratic team this year. In that sense, this isn’t an endorsement of George Bush, but an explanation as to why I won’t vote for Mr. Kerry.
I am not alone in this thinking.
Firstly, I don’t believe Kerry’s position on national defense is the right one, and that’s an overriding issue for me. But more than his position is his history on the matter. I can’t cast my ballot for a man who denigrated the service of myself and my friends and contemporaries 35 years ago. As Murrow wrote so long ago, “We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.” I will not vote to put into the most powerful position on the planet a man who used the tragedy of Vietnam to further his own political goals at the expense of our country.
I grew up in the 50s and got my draft notice in the summer of 1965. I spent 5 years in the service during the Vietnam era. My classmates and friends were those who went away and did their duty during a difficult time in American history. MY contemporaries. MY friends. MY generation. I escaped direct conflict, but I was proud of my service to my family and my country.
People who didn’t live through it simply cannot understand what life was like back then. We lost our belly for war and it has never come back. Hell, I’m one of those who believe Johnson was elected in ‘64 because people were afraid that Goldwater would drop the H-bomb on Hanoi and trigger the dreaded global nuclear war. We should’ve nuked Hanoi. Why wage war if you don’t intend to win it? We didn’t lose Vietnam. We simply gave it away.
Vietnam was the first television war, and moms didn’t like what they saw. Hell, nobody did. But here’s the real kicker. The country took it out on the soldiers who — like their fathers before them — were serving faithfully and honorably. There was a while there where even once proud soldiers put their uniforms in the closet and didn’t engage in conversation about the war for fear of being shunned. That is absolutely true, and we have, among others, John Kerry to thank for that.
As a fledgling reporter in the early 70s, I covered events of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I didn’t think much of them then, and I think even less of them today. They didn’t speak for me or any friends and classmates that I knew. This was a small group of exploitive and destructive individuals, an organized mob bent on disruption and destruction of anything and everything, so that they could draw attention to their cause.
I’m not suggesting the VVAW was disingenuous. They just didn’t deserve the visibility they received, and their tactics were an affront to the vast majority of the men and women who served with nobility and honor. It grieves me to see history using words like “movement” to describe their ilk or recording the idea that “even the soldiers who served there were against it.” Bullshit. If history’s eyes were truly open, the VVAW would be rightly seen as a scruffy band of renegades who took advantage of a press eager for conflict at a time when our country needed it least.
The VVAW used John Kerry’s clean-shaved face and eloquence to give them an air of legitimacy, but John Kerry used the VVAW as a platform for his own ambitions. And now you’re asking me to put him in charge of our military? I just can’t do it. He might make an outstanding commander-in-chief. He’s proven bravery in combat, hasn’t he? He even proved a willingness for preemptive action when he went after an enemy grenade launcher in Vietnam. But that is irrelevant to this veteran, someone who understands that behavior has consequences, and that the Biblical dog always returns to his vomit. Kerry’s desires were demonstrated when he ran for office immediately following his leadership of the VVAW. If he wins this election, I’ll willingly support him, but I won’t be one who puts him in office.
Secondly, I don’t want a trial lawyer a heartbeat from the Presidency. I’m on the record about this political group. Trial lawyers are a huge part of the problem in our country. Their reason for being involves dividing people. Claiming to be for the common man, their real motivation is transferring wealth from deep pockets to their own.
Trial lawyers have the deepest bench in the quest for the legislatures that run our varying levels of government, and they write the laws that line their own pockets. I don’t think that should be permitted, but I’m just a voice crying in the wilderness. So how could I flip the knob and put a man like John Edwards a breath away from the top administrative job in the world? I can’t.
When it comes to war, I am a hawk’s hawk. That’s because history teaches you can’t negotiate your way to peace and freedom. Human nature gets in the way, but I guess if you believe that we’re all just goodness personified, then you can reason that talking is the solution. Again, think about what Murrow said. We can deny history, if we want, but we cannot escape the consequences of so doing.
I don’t give a shit if Osama didn’t dine regularly with Saddam or that the dictator didn’t have any nukes. When the country declared war on terrorists (and we all did), Iraq was fair game, as was Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and anybody else who stood in the way of our own peace and safety. We don’t have the belly for war anymore, and that will be our downfall. We don’t like people getting hurt, but people do get hurt in war — many of them unjustly. But like Bush, I’d rather those unjust deaths occur elsewhere, not here.
I don’t like George Bush. I’ve never gotten along with his personality type, but I cheered during his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001. “Our enemy,” he said, “is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.” Now, you may not be at war with terror, but I am, and I think the second half of that statement is more important than the first.
I’ve not written this to change anybody’s mind about November 2nd. I believe in author transparency and am posting this for that reason alone. Voting is a private matter. My thoughts and biases may have nothing to do with yours, and if I grant you leave to vote your conscience, then please grant me mine. Like the PoMos about which I write, I trust my experience and my gut in important matters, and I do so above all the so-called experts. That’s a privilege that comes with growing older — you have more life experience upon which to draw.
I can’t and won’t send a mixed message about that experience.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2004 at 10:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
October 25th, 2004 at 2:15 pm
All the best Terry.
I won’t burden your server with future RSS queries.
October 25th, 2004 at 2:45 pm
And I won’t take it personally. Best to you, George.
October 25th, 2004 at 2:50 pm
Argh. God forbid you have to hear something that doesn’t jive with your own personal predisposition.
Ironically, I’m sorry to see you go. Because it means it’s just one more foot in the grave for honest, old-fashioned debate… and more of the "cover your ears so you won’t hear the opposition" type diatribe that’s the hallmark of this election.
Come on. I disagree with Terry on this one too. But I wasn’t around for Vietnam, so maybe I’m lacking the experience he talks about. Nonetheless, I’m not about to pick up my newsreader and go home because "wah he doesn’t like my candidate!"
Adios George.
October 25th, 2004 at 2:52 pm
To be clear, that post was directed at George. Little bit of synchronous posting there…
October 25th, 2004 at 2:57 pm
First, thank you for your service to our country.
I am young, female, and a liberal on nearly every issue, but I can’t vote for Kerry, either. You’ve gotten it exactly right about the mixed messages. Mixed messages on the one issue that’s most important right now is simply something we can’t tolerate. Do I think gay people should have their full rights? Yes. Should everyone have access to healthcare? Yes. Should we be funding the arts at about five times the rate we are, to make sure that our kids grow up having something to read and write about other than godforsaken reality TV crap? Yes.
Does ANY of that matter if we lose the war on terror? No. If a suitcase nuke makes it in, there will be no weddings at all, gay or straight, and there will be no healthcare because the doctors will be dead, too.
We need a hawk in office more than we need liberal social policies right now. Sad, but true.
October 25th, 2004 at 8:34 pm
I’m heartily saddened by this, but I respect your decision.
I recognize now, more fully than before, that you and I are nearly a generation apart. My childhood memory is still seared with the photos of the My Lai issue of Life magazine, seeing those little bodies broken and discarded. That was as much a truth as the fact of my own beloved uncle’s service; he left for Vietnam in ‘65 and came back a scarred individual, no longer the happy-go-lucky person he was before he left, a walking shell of a human being. Vietnam was a bad war fought by innocent boys against equally innocent people; I remember how numbingly unreal it was, seeing those body counts were every single night on television, wondering how many civilians had been killed as well. And for what? We cannot win a war of memes — capitalism versus communism — by throwing bodies of troops and civilians at the problem. It is grossly immoral; it is grossly ineffective.
As a culture we began to lose our innocence by way of Vietnam. I cannot fault John Kerry’s intent in protesting the war; My Lai gave testament to atrocities that can happen when innocent people are forced into malignant circumstances. Because of my uncle’s experience I understand only too well that the people who served there were well-meaning and moral people caught up in something that was beyond their ability to change.
And now, having encouraged my stepson to serve in the armed forces under Clinton, only to have this once happy-go-lucky boy ship off to serve in Iraq, it’s all too, too familiar. The same talking heads justifying the same kind of illegitimate, ineffective war. What’s improved is the body counts – only in terms of troop deaths. We have the same casualty rate we had in Vietnam, only more of the casualties are amputees and head injuries that might not have survived in Vietnam. The press can now discard their numbers because they survived.
And for what? What is this all about? It’s yet another war of memes — Judeo-Christian capitalistic democracy against Muslim theocracy — with innocent bodies thrown at more innocent bodies. This time the throwers are people who have no real ken of war, are people who actively sought to avoid serving. At least John Kerry served, has a far better understanding of what it means when civilian administrations throw bodies at memes. At least John Kerry has a grasp on the reality that this is a war that cannot be fought with guns alone, that memes can only be defeated with other, better memes. (As for the VVAW: they tried to fight a meme with a meme of their own. Obviously their meme was not effective or persuasive. In my mind they are only background noise, compared to the persistent barrage of nightly body counts, the images of My Lai, the reality of shattered vets returning home. It’s unfortunate for you that that their meme did a number on you.)
Of all people, I felt sure that you would understand this, having some grasp of postmoderns. But perhaps between us there is not only a generation in age, but another shift. Do you really understand postmoderns after all? Are you really more likely to identify with a modern like George Bush who’ll rail against that which is postmodern, unable to handle that which is beyond absolutism, dualism? Can you not see that protesting a bad war – protesting a memetic failure – is no slight against the people who are forced for whatever reason to serve that failing meme? I know I can understand this, having unwittingly sent my own family member off into this very vortex; I cannot fault whatever may have happened at his hands understanding this as I do. But I cannot support or accept the failing meme.
In parting, I need to point out to you that the argument rationalizing a war in Iraq to prevent terrorists with small nuclear weapons is incredibly poor. Fighting a bad war is a waste on the face of it; failing to execute any war properly can be criminal. The persistent failure of this administration to plan and achieve the most obvious military objectives – securing 760,000 pounds of explosives in al Qa Qaa, Iraq, for example – makes this already bad war an utter joke. Imagine the enormity of 760,000 pounds of missing explosives in the hands of angry insurgents/terrorists/freedom fighters, spread around the world.
Some of the missing explosives were RDX; RDX was found in the remains of the blasts in Bali (October 2002), in Sumatra (May 2004), and possibly in Jakarta (August 2003). All of these blasts are attributed to associates related to al Qaeda. Is it at all possible that these incidents that killed more than 220 people were related to our failure in Iraq?
In addition to the missing RDX, twenty-two pounds of uranium have also gone missing from Iraq since the invasion. There is at least one party who has suggested the Bali blast was a mini-nuclear device, detonated by RDX [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steveseymour/nuke/bali_nuke.htm]. Is it possible that the Bush administration is already responsible through its gross negligence for letting loose this most fearsome evil?
Is it possible that some of this 760,000 pounds of explosives are in an ocean container, going through a lightly to unsecured US port even now? How will voting for increased corporate tax cuts, reducing or eliminating women’s access to abortions, souring our environment, saber-rattling against Muslims and all the other sundry modernist and pre-modernist memes that come with the Bush administration fix this massive failure of execution?
I cannot vote for Bush. I regret you feel compelled to do so. But I’ll continue to hope that in this war of memes that somehow you’ll see our security is already compromised and that only successful memetics combined with *effective* military measures will reduce the threat to our lives. I’ll hope that you realize a faith-based presidency is one locked tightly into a meme – one that is failing our country, failing our world.
October 25th, 2004 at 10:02 pm
Rayne, did I miss the part where he said he was voting for Bush? I read a lot about why he isn’t voting for Kerry.
Unless you are feeling rather dualist, absolutist, and modernist today, and therefore insisting that not to vote for Senator I-voted-for-the-$87-billion-before-I-voted
against-it-yes-knowing-what-I-know-today-I
would-have-cast-the-same-vote-for-the-war-I-wouldn’t-
have-done-one-thing-different-I’d-have-done-everything-
different-this-is-the-wrong-war-at-the-wrong-place-
and-the-wrong-time-so-we-need-40,000-new-troops
-there-and-I-will-get-allies-to-join-us-because-our-future
action-to-defend-ourselves-must-pass-the-global-test-no-that’s
-not-what-I-meant-so-stop-saying-that
is a vote for Bush? That’s rather black-and-white thinking, isn’t it? I must’ve just missed the part where he said he was pulling the lever for the President.
In college, I was infuriated the day one of my Professors told me that a conservative was a liberal who’d been mugged. I thought he was making fun of my idealism, and it hurt. But he was right.
I suppose you could say a hawk is a dove who still has nightmares of the people jumping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive.
Kerry would be a much more faith-based presidency than this one. It would be require daily faith that he meant what he said right now and wasn’t going to take eight more positions on the matter by lunchtime tomorrow.
Like you, I am scared of what Bush would do in a second term. I am far more scared of what Kerry wouldn’t do. Bush needs Congress for almost everything. With enough pressure, he can be held in check to a certain degree. Dems aren’t even in the majority right now in Congress, and they’ve managed to stop many of his judiciary appointments. Contrariwise, there is no power on earth that can make Kerry take a stand when one is needed. No check and balance against cowardice.
I don’t mean to flame you, Rayne. Like you, I read this blog every day and I have always enjoyed your comments. I guess I am failing to grasp the connection between Pomo and the inability to take a firm stand on something.
I have agonized over who I would vote for since March. I have come to the horrifying conclusion that I have blood on my hands either way. Voting for Bush, that blood is likelier to be the blood of terrorist scum than Americans, as he won’t sit around and wait for an attack to happen before he does something.
Someone I really care about is shipping off to Iraq for his second one-year term right before Thanksgiving. I asked him who I should vote for, and he said without hesitating that he’s voting for Bush, because he’d rather take the risk of dying to prevent another 9/11 than die *in* another 9/11, or see me or our other friends die in one. Here he was, telling me I may be voting for his death, but it’s what he wanted me to do. Don’t think I won’t shed tears on November 2nd, no matter what happens.
Life is so f*cking complicated.
October 25th, 2004 at 11:34 pm
Dude you need to seriously stop talking in the "we". It undercuts your entire point. "We" don’t suck on cancer sticks. bla blah blah.
"I’m not suggesting the VVAW was disingenuous. They just didn’t deserve the visibility they received…" That pretty much covers it. Seriously dude the mixed messages are oozing out of your text…whatever. When we all get what we deserve then perhaps we’ll get our messages straight…whatever.
October 26th, 2004 at 11:08 pm
I stumbled on this essay and agree with it almost completely. George Bush has his problems and I very much dislike some of his advisors but at least they have a decent conception of leadership. John Kerry keeps talking about the past and the leadup to the war. From what I can tell, he has basically the same plan as Bush for getting out of Iraq. So he just bitches and nitpicks. That is not presidential. It’s the same kind of attitude that made me not vote for Bob Dole.
I thought that Clinton was a poor president who didn’t accomplish anything on his own but Dole was just a whiner like Kerry.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:12 pm
Q: What is the difference between an immature voter and a mature voter?
A: The immature voter thinks his vote is all about HIM.
The mature voter/citizen votes according to his assessment of which candidate will better serve the community (in this case, country).
The mature voter can vote for a candidate who will increase the voter’s personal taxes, reduce the voter’s personal services, etc IF the voter believes the community as a whole is benefitted.
Hell, the mature voter can be right out insulted, denied, dissed and pissed on from above by a candidate and still vote for him, because that’s what his assessment of the situation tells him is for the greater good.
You remind me of the business associate who said "I don’t like the business decision you made so I’m not your friend any more".
The leadership of the country is not personal. Thinking like yours is what has allowed politicans to prey on our greed. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s not a count of which candidate is "most like" most people.
It’s a conversation about what the collective "we" is. Not a statement about your individual "I". Being liberal may not mean "Democrat", but does it at least still include "responsible", for you? And if so, responsible to more than just "I"? The latter is not responsibility, it’s selfishness.