Clara Barton said,
“I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them. ”
This is quite a challenging statement to reflect on today when some people think that “support the troops” means slapping a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of their cars and pickups and calling everyone a traitor who doesn’t support what Bush has done in Iraq.
The president himself has not called on us to stand beside these soldiers. He told us to keep shopping and to go about our business. Unlike during Viet Nam, the network news doesn’t show us the unloading of body bags or a daily body count at the end of the day. We don’t have to sacrifice gasoline, or flour, or tires, or sugar, and we don’t have to take time to roll bandages.
So the most we have to do is to be passive consumers and turn our attention to something else - the unburied Anna Nichole Smith, for instance. All Bush asks of us plain people in rural places is to just keep sending our children.