This has circulated through email and was forwarded so many times that the author is “unknown” except for his first name. Thank you Nick!
When you hear someone say, “our country is at war,” what is really meant is that our military is at war. Why haven’t we, the civilians, paid a special war tax, bought war bonds, or been required to volunteer in some organization that assists our troops?
THE ANSWER: We are a Welfare Nation! Someone else will earn it for us!
I have often said that since the draft was eliminated, we have an entire generation of adults that seem to take so much of what this country was built on for granted. So many of those people are the liberals that today are standing for everything and anything that comes along.
God Bless America and the percentage who actually have served their Country in the military. Something to think about! Received from a friend and I think very well done:
I remember the day I found out I got into West Point. My mom actually showed up in the hallway of my high school and waited for me to get out of class. She was bawling her eyes out and apologizing that she had opened up my admission letter.
She wasn’t crying because it had been her dream for me to go there. She was crying because she knew how hard I’d worked to get in, how much I wanted to attend, and how much I wanted to be an infantry officer. I was going to get that opportunity.
That same day two of my teachers took me aside and essentially told me the following: Nick, you’re a smart guy. You don’t have to join the military. You should go to college, instead. I could easily write a tome defending West Point and the military as
I did that day, explaining that USMA is an elite institution, that is separate in that it is actually statistically much harder to enlist in the military than it is to get admitted to college. That serving the nation is a challenge that all able-bodied men should at least consider for a host of reasons, but I won’t.
What I will say is, that when a 16 year-old kid is being told that attending West Point is going to be bad for his future then there is a dangerous disconnect in America, and entirely too many Americans have no idea what kind of burdens our military is bearing.
In World War II, 11.2% of the nation served in four years.
In Vietnam, 4.3% served in 12 years.
Since 2001, only 0.45% of our population has served in the Global War on Terror.
These are unbelievable statistics.
Over time, fewer and fewer people have shouldered more and more of the burden and it is only getting worse.
Our troops were sent to war in Iraq by a Congress consisting of 10% veterans with only one person having a child in the military.
Taxes did not increase to pay for the war.
War bonds were not sold.
Gas was not regulated.
In fact, the average citizen was asked to sacrifice nothing, and has sacrificed nothing unless they have chosen to out of the goodness of their hearts.
The only people who have sacrificed are the veterans and their families. The volunteers. The people who swore an oath to defend this nation.
You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on.
You’ve lost relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years apart from kids you’ll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even professional athletes don’t understand. Then you come home to a nation that doesn’t understand.
They don’t understand suffering.
They don’t understand sacrifice.
They don’t understand why we fight for them.
They don’t understand that bad people exist.
They look at you like you’re a machine – as if something is wrong with you.
You are the misguided one – not them.
When you get out, you sit in the college classrooms with political science teachers who discount your opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can’t understand the macro issues they gathered from books, because of your bias.
You watch TV shows where every vet has a violent strain of PTSD.
Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your pay, all the while asking you to do more. But, the amazing thing about you is that you all know this.
You know your country will never pay back what you’ve given up.
You know that the populace at large will never truly understand or
appreciate what you have done for them.
You know that in some circles, you will be thought of as less than
normal for having worn the uniform.
But, you do it anyway.
You do what the greatest men and women of this country have done since 1775
YOU SERVED.
Just that decision alone makes you part of an elite group.
“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”
–Winston Churchill
Thank you to those who have and continue to serve our Nation.
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CherriesWriter - Vietnam War website 
RIGHT ON THE MONEYT
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I spoke with a 226 year old individual, an insurance solicitor that called my cell number (thanks Obama) and after trying to shut him up we started talking about his future.
He was completely oblivious of the world around him, thought that buying precious metals (certificates not actual) and building a large stock portfolio was his guarantee for a retirement in 30 years.
I smiled as I burst his bubble. In 20 years the number of individuals receiving social security will out number the individuals paying into the system. The number of high income jobs will continue to erode as technology replaces the human interface. insurance exchanges online will replace him and online public schools will replace qualified teachers as online degrees qualify our operators in nuclear power plants and politicians in D.C.
As messed up as this world is, his is going to be much worse unless his generation looks outside their own bubble and WAKES UP!
We’re downsizing the military while government grows. We’re making security cuts while 20,000 new IRS agents are hired to monitor Obamacare. Premiums for the “at risk” population will be 4 or 5 times that of a healthy individual (I’ve hit that wall already) and the proposed $9 minimum wage will kill the low skill labor market, while companies cut back below 30 hours per week (my granddaughter has a new schedule of 29 hours at Macky-D’s ) to remove the requirement to provide health insurance to full time workers. Those workers left will have to declare their “hole filled golden parachute insurance” on their income next year.
He didn’t seem impressed and was “only concerned about his own future”.
I bade him goodbye, shaking my head over the complete waste of time.
As for WAR! I always thought a war was fought by two nations or in a civil war between two conflicting idealogies, but a war on terror, fighting a shadow enemy is the stupidest thing we have ever done, and yet no one cares. OMG! That’s right, we’re only going to have a $690 Billion deficit for 2013…who in heck decided the physical year ended in June!
Oh well, we old Vietnam pharts will be gone in less than a decade and we can roll over in our graves while the entitlement class destroys yet another great republic, but what liberal will actually tell the truth about the U.S.A. in the cyber history books? 1984 folks, only delayed 30 years…big brother is watching, but Orwell had no idea that the brother he was telling about would actually be a “bro”!
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