Can you say, “Fuck the police!”? Can you say it aloud when you’re not alone? To your friends? To a colleague? Shout it out on the street? If the answer to any of those questions is “yes”, even if you have no personal vendetta against the cops, then take a moment to reflect on why you might feel empowered to speak thus. Perhaps it is because others have said those words before you, and repeated them enough for them to now be utterable without sending shockwaves through the listening crowd.

Now try the same experiment with the line “Fuck the army!”. Dinner conversation will quickly trail off into silence, punctuated by forks dropping to the plate as appetites are lost. “Ungrateful brat”, staring eyes will be saying as grandpa gets up to leave.

We need to revise our attitude towards the military. It’s an old, stale attitude and the sooner we get rid of it, the sooner we can stop ravaging countries we have no business being in while celebrating the ravagers as heroes. Old reasons for revering our soldiers have thinned out - there is honour in defending our families, our homes, our country, but today there is no threat at our doorstep. Try the one-sentence-reason-for-going-to-war test: can you justify, clearly and briefly, why the US fought its recent wars? To refresh your memory, here’s an abridged list of recent US military interventions:

World War II

Korea

Vietnam

Gulf War

Somalia

Haiti

Yugoslavia

Kosovo

Afghanistan

Iraq

Libya

You might do a fantastic job with reasoning about one or two of the above, might be a bit hazy on a few others, and may never have learned enough or have forgotten about the rest. In particular, the contrast between the first and the last on that list is striking: in one case the aggressor brought the battle to us and we retaliated — as simple an explanation as one could possibly get — and in the other… umm… who the hell really knows? If you think you really do know, then you’re a lot smarter than most foreign policy experts, including analysts at the leading policy journal that seem to contradict themselves here and here.

The increasingly thick haze over justifications for sending our people to war must call into question the nobility of the esteemed troops who carry out these orders. The use of the word “must” here is deliberate, for if we fail to incorporate just cause into our calculation of esteem, then we will end up holding the paratroopers who jumped into Normandy and the pilots who sprayed Agent Orange on the same pedestal.

The other variable we must add to this equation is the motivation for enlisting. A high school graduate who joined the army because he put himself before his country would indeed be an inspiring young man, but patriotism is not what fuels enlistment; economic pressure, and the promises of education & travel are the real drivers. It’s sad that the path of choice to earn a college degree for so many citizens of the richest country in the world involves putting their lives on the line, but that’s a different topic.

If our attitude towards the military must change, how then should this change manifest? Perhaps we could start by treating them as we treat any other working class. By not mindlessly offering a “Thank you for your service” without understanding the morality of their motivations & actions.