Have your nineteen year old friend die in your arms in some God forsaken part of the world and then make the comparison.
PS: While your at it, thank that nineteen year old kid for having the guts to do what needed to be done so you could have the right to publicly make whatever foolish statement that enters your head.
Half a day at half staff seems a small price to pay for such a large debt.
I assume you are addressing my post, although I certainly hope not, because if you are then it does not speak well of either your knowledge, your reasoning here, or perhaps both your knowledge and your reasoning here.
Let me begin with an apparently necessary question, do we live in the same world? Is the world in which you live the same as mine? A world in which not only service members sometimes die in the line of duty, but a world in which fire fighters also sometimes die in the line of duty. And police officers too? Or even teachers these days?
Yes I know you will most likely say, "But service members take greater risks and have higher mortality and casualty rates than those other groups."
But you do NOT want to go down that road because it leads straight to the fact that in every war of this or the last century it has not been combatants who suffered the most dead, maimed, crippled, and wounded, but instead, and by far,
non-combatants. Men, women, and children who never signed up for the war in the first place.
So, if you still insist on tallying up numbers and then accounting special and superior those groups who have suffered most, you won't get far with me, or with most any rational person, unless you are fair and just enough to include in your books
everyone who is made to suffer for our freedoms -- even including those innocents who never signed up to take upon themselves the risk of suffering.
Moreover, I wonder where you get the idea -- maybe I should even say here, "the nerve" -- to imply I might lack sufficient respect for our military members simply on the grounds that I equally respect other public servants too?
In the first place, that's a low, vulgar, personal attack on me, to say nothing of being false and misleading. Yet, I still have too much respect for you to hold it against you, so you're off the hook with me in that one way, if only in that one way.
But in the second place, you force me to ask, do you think respect is some kind of zero-sum game? Do you think if Jones is highly respected, then Smith cannot be highly respected too without that somehow, in some mysterious way, damaging the respect for Jones?
Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? It sounds just as if you somehow have made yourself believe that respect is like a bucket of water, and that once you've poured out the water, there's no more to go around.
You gratuitously accuse me of making "foolish statements", but look to your own house first! I must begin to wonder now if you even calmly and reasonably think through your own words and what they mean before you post them? Did you actually make the effort to first understand my post before lashing out? It does not look like it to me.
Again, you imply that I might actually in some sense begrudge our military members "half a day at half staff". I've already forgiven you once for attacking me, but this time, I will say this: Quote me where I said any such a thing or even logically implied such a thing, for it's high time you "put up or shut up".
Last, I am disgusted with your reasoning here. There's no better word for it than disgusted. So, whatever response you make to this post, will be met with silence on my part unless -- you reason more rigorously, fairly, and less accusingly than you have been reasoning. I could say so much more than what I have about your post, but only at risk that you might
legitimately feel yourself insulted, so I simply won't.
Thank your for your service. I mean that sincerely.
But no thanks -- absolutely none -- for your unjust, false, and misleading post.