General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you've never served in the military than you can't criticize those who have. [View all]patrice
(47,992 posts)It is the particular mix of rights and/or wrongs, validities and/or invalidities, that makes one's own understanding (which ever mix, valid:invalid is the predominant trait of your own understandings) significant in larger events.
I'm with you, I couldn't kill people simply because someone ordered me to, but I equally cannot say, "Better dead than _________________ " and I know that there are those who do think "Better dead than __________________ ."
k, so what to do, as a person of conscience caught in this situation? I don't really know. All I do know is that (e.g. as we are seeing in the gun ownership debate) there are none so blind as those who will not see and the most blind also tend to have the most political inertia, so they pull lots of other more or less benighted folks along with them.
I know it really is just REALLY to facile to put it this way, but the problem is like kicking a dog ("the blind" , because it can't sing opera. It makes monsters out of the dog and you and singing of anykind becomes extinct.
What we must do has to begin with recognizing the limitations upon our more obsolete ideas about how to do it. That's because, if I am to have a right to my own FREE moral conscience, I MUST respect that right in others to the extent that theirs is also free. And it is possible that free honest individuals have chosen the responsibility of doing the best they can to protect others from those who do, in fact, believe and act upon the principle that "Better dead than ___________________ " is true for anyone and everyone, especially as long as it isn't themselves.
This is one of the reasons that what happened under the influence of Evangelical End Timers in the last Republican administration is such a profound sacrilege, because it took all of this and profaned people's efforts to do their best to do what is right with LIES and WAR PROFITEERING and, in the process, also pulled some very sadly deluded folks, lost, foolish, ir-responsible, childish, blind folks along with them, many of whom are maybe somewhat wiser now. And I don't think that judgement and the wrong kind of pressure is going to help any of them figure out his/her own valid:invalid valence, but I do think that it is my responsibility to call upon them to do so as honestly and freely as possible and, thus, to yield to them the same rights of conscience that I claim for myself.