Your Government does not care about you. You are nothing but a pawn. They do not care about what your parents have done. They do not care if you intend to follow in your parent’s footsteps. Why would they care?  You aren’t dead. They can’t parade your family around and crow about how much they appreciate your sacrifice for freedom. 

Your entire childhood has meant nothing to your government except an opportunity to woo people from similar backgrounds your own parents may have come from- poor, undereducated, and often looking for a way out of the lives they are faced with- into a false sense of security and hope through a contract with the United States military.

By remaining silent you are perpetuating those lies. You know these promises aren’t true. The schooling promised to us comes in moldy buildings a football field or so away from extreme noise pollution. Our healthcare comes through the lowest bidder. Our houses are near uninhabitable in cases. Many of us drink contaminated water and don’t know it until there is very little to be done about it. Everyone knows at least someone who was food insecure. When is the last time any improvement has been made for our families that wasn’t an attempt to save a rapidly declining approval rating? When is the last time those actions were not double edged blades created to buy our silence and threaten those who cannot be bought? 

There is an unspoken code of silence amongst the family members of active duty and retired veterans. We were silent in 2003 when George W. Bush sent troops to invade Iraq. We were silent when he turned around and laughed about how he lied about WMDs in Iraq. We were silent throughout the deadliest years of both Iraq and Afghanistan. We were silent as we spread like a disease over the Middle East and Africa. We were silent as, for 18 years, our fathers, brothers, children, friends, and eventually mothers and sisters came home in flag draped boxes from conflicts that were meant to end by the time we were in kindergarten. And now, on the precipice of violent and catastrophic conflict with Iran, we are silent. We have a Commander in Chief that has done nothing but spit in our faces from the moment his father bought his way out of Vietnam. They defund basic infrastructure for our families and destroy the guarantee of citizenship for those of us born outside of the United states.  We now have friends fighting in a war that has expanded past our memory, and well past our suspension of disbelief. Many of them will come home missing parts of themselves, and will receive a pittance of help from the nation they thought they were fighting for. And yet, we are silent.

There is no excuse for lack of action. We know what is happening. We know that, Democrat or Republican, there will be no meaningful change in American war mongering unless we actively rage against the institution we know better than anyone else and demand change. We can no longer pretend that American Imperialism has not left a festering gash in the psyche of the earth. For all of our struggles under the boot of the great imperial reaper, we have profited endlessly from the suffering of innocent men, women, and children all over the world. We tout ourselves as the leaders of the free world, but the free world seems to only exist as a pipe dream for those of us who cannot afford to perpetuate eternal violence with little consequence to ourselves.

Our silence is approval. Our silence is complacency. Our silence is cowardice. 

-Sorcha Flynn