Member-only story
I’ve never been patriotic. That might sound odd for someone who enlisted two separate times in the military but it’s true.
I joined the Coast Guard when I was 17 because I wanted to rescue people, save the environment and generally be in the military without having to kill people because I was kind of a pacifist. Later on I signed up for the California National Guard because I was going through a states rights phase, and also needed money for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu lessons.
And maybe this is part of being Jewish, where your identity is all bound up with a people who have been fleeing persecution forever. So it’s hard to put your faith in whatever country you happen to be at the moment, knowing your relatives have had to flee when the neighbors begin lighting the torches and sharpening the pitchforks.
The point of this article is that I don’t understand why we, the human race, accept that 15 to 25 percent of our number live in a dictatorship, without the human rights that the U.S. declares inalienable and we do nothing about it.
Yes this might seem oddly mistimed, unapropos as it were, given the U.S. leaving Afghanistan and women and men about to lose the rights we were able to protect for around 20 years. But that’s the point. It would be nice if we had sent troops (or better the U.N.) to say you cannot have below this standard of rights…
