I remember when Nancy Reagan was on her Just Say No to Drugs campaign and Timothy Leary replied, “Our kids should be better mannered than that! We should tell them, Just say, ‘No, thank you.’ Any blanket ‘Just say no’ is a negative approach to life, which is typical of the Reagan administration.” It was 1987, I was fifteen, and it made perfect sense to me. Every time I walked through Washington Square Park I would smile and say no thank you.
This fellow, Ehren Watada, a twenty-eight year old First Lieutenant in the United States Army, has refused join his brothers in arms in Iraq. “It is my duty as a commissioned officer of the United States Army to speak out against grave injustices. My moral and legal obligation is to the constitution and not those who would issue unlawful orders. It is my conclusion as an officer of the armed forces that the war in Iraq is not only morally wrong, but a horrible breach of American law.” Nice one.
It is amusing, in a dark kind of way, that the New York Times has not mentioned Ehren in its pages. These are editorial decisions, not the decisions of an inanimate newspaper that generates stories on its own. It was mentioned on June 8th in a Washington Post article. It is interesting to see which papers find this story newsworthy. Fox news has reported on it, undoubtedly for the story’s inflammatory potential. CNN, of course, has not– not quite sensational enough– they were the ones who’s coverage of the attack on Baghdad was interspersed with commercials for the U.S. Army…
Is this the beginning of the Just Say No Thank You To WAR campaign? I am working on the t-shirts and buttons. What about the magnet bows for the car? I’ve wanted to make a bunch of those with alternative messages to replace the jingoistic ones on cars.
litte fact:
An Army fact sheet dated Sept. 21, 2005, the most recent available, said 87 conscientious objector applications had been approved and 101 denied since January 2003.
Comments on this entry are closed.