Posted by Erica on April 25, 19104 at 19:29:33:

In Reply to: Re: I'm a Seventeen Year Old Conservative! posted by chric on August 15, 19100 at 19:37:58:

As one 17-year old conservative to another, I thought I'd take a minute to respond to this post, not including the comments about Clinton. I couldn't help but notice that you announced that you would dodge any modern draft without even taking the particulars of the war into account. One pretty standard characteristic of conservativism is the belief in some essenital absolute moral truth as opposed to moral relativism. Are you saying that even if someone threatened innocent people,your beliefs, your country's security, even the security of your family and friends as Americans, you could blithly dismiss war as some stupid scheme to give "macho jocks" an identity? You indicated a strong personal dislike of communism and socialism when discussing FDR- would you dismiss out of hand a summons from your country to protect your home and western civilization from a threat such as those? Finally, your characterization of our military personal was both uninformed and offensive. Contrary to your depiction, our men and women in uniform are not "losers" and "macho jocks" in search of an idenity; they are disciplined, intelligent, highly-skilled individuals who often deliberately forgo much more lucrative employment in the private sector for the sake of their principles. All of the military servicemen and veterans that I know are outstanding people, not igorant bullies who think that hurting people is fun. As for the military not building character, I encourage you to actually investigate the curriculum and philisophy that institutions like West Point instill in cadets, or speak to an actual Marine. Perhaps I seem to be coming down hard on you, and I suspect that you could reply "But that's not what I meant" to some of the examples that I used. However, there is no excuse for such sweeping, misinformed generalizations about our honorable soldiers or dismissal of the very real ethical struggles and implications involved in war. In closing, a thought by one of the best Presidents ever, Ronald Reagan: "...I urge you to beware the temptation of pride - the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
Erica

Follow Ups:

Post a Followup