On Memorial Day we are meant to reflect on the sacrifice of soldiers. I have many thoughts, but here’s one that a wider audience might find more palatable.
The soldiers who died probably had many motivations, a diverse list of what ideal or who made their sacrifice worth it to them. Still, I doubt any of them died for “tax payers”! Yet, if you listen to the rhetoric of a lot of modern politicians (right or left) these are the entities of primary concern. Not citizens, not children, wives, and mothers, not the elderly, the disabled, the downtrodden, just “tax-payers”.
This country has some lofty ideals of being for all of us, at least in writing, and I am pretty sure those types of ideals and the types of people who don’t really fit into under the label of “tax-payer” are what most of those soldiers thought they were fighting for, so maybe we should be way less okay with politicians who diminish their sacrifice by reducing who this country is for down to “tax-payers”.
A Mind Running Wild 