Letter: A ‘patriot’ should oppose new and continued war
To the editor,
–This county, and presumably much of this country, has become dotted with flags flying at half mast over the last days and weeks. Standard public internet spaces have been a platform for a trend of restaurants and bars setting out rounds of food or drinks, “Reserved For Our 13 Fallen Soldiers,” as a sign in one picture read. After seeing much of the same in the aftermath of 9/11, and the decades of needless conflict that would follow, these displays fill me with disgust.
What is clear to me, with 20 years of retrospect at my disposal, is that the terror and suffering inflicted by those attacks has since been dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the terror and suffering that would follow, as a result of a pursuit of restitution for those attacks, in the form of an unnecessary and completely impotent war.
If you’ve had nothing to say for the more than 6000 American veterans and soldiers who die by suicide every year then keep the performative outrage over combat deaths to yourself. They deserve to be mourned, and the people responsible held accountable. The same can be said for the victims of 9/11, and for those thirteen Marines, certainly, but as well as for the countless thousand of others who have died in the course of the war in the middle east, whether it be in a bombing or by their own hand.
The only way to honor all of these people is to stop this war for good. If you consider yourself a patriot, or an at all moral person, you should oppose new and continued wars every way you can.
Zach Cuyama
Paso Robles
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