Soldiers Dying and Liberty

Today on TOTN discussion about Cindy Sheehan and families of the fallen. Unfortunately I did not get to hear the whole discussion, coming in at the tail end as Neal Conan asks one grieving mother whether she feels her son died for a reason. You've got about a 50/50 shot of being right on this one. This mother's response was that her son died fighting for a noble cause, because (I paraphrase here) people in other parts of the world deserve the same freedoms we have.

Now I don't happen to blame a parent who has had to bury a child for wanting to have some sense of purpose in it all. My gripe is with the warmongers who exploit that kind of simple thinking to achive their results. If people didn't engage in this kind of flawed thinking we probably wouldn't have our asses stuck deep in the sands of Eye-Rack.

It just makes me cringe when I hear people say that others "deserve" our freedoms. Do they deserve them at gunpoint? Do we have the right to march into the capitol of any nation in order to bring democracy to a country near you? Do the people want democracy, such as it is, more than sufficient food, work, shelter, medical care, and power? Do we have the right to make that decision for those people?

I have sympathy for all the grieving families but we have the duty to correct the flawed logic now being used to support the colonialization of the middle-east.