So I toss out an offhanded comment about how I'll be glad when all the damn kids will be back in school soon so the adults can have fun, and this individual informs me "im 19 im not no fukinn kid show sum respect i serve our country"
Did you catch that? We have here a fresh out of highschool (maybe) jarhead who thinks that it is the height of our society to aspire to military service, and that this should garner automatic respect. I didn't even know what to say at first, the fallacy of his statement having completely overwhelmed me. It actually took me a minute to get my bearings and be able to respond.
During this time, he went on to tell me that I was a mistake, that people like me should have been swallowed (I'm sure you catch the drift on that one), that we're less than human, we're chink/nigger lovers (I handed him a nice hate speech report for that one), and that the US would be a lot better off if the military ran things and everyone else just shut the fuck up. Of course, he wasn't nearly as concise or well-spoken, but in the interest of not dumbing my brain down any further, I've paraphrased.
Amid all the other children saying "LOL" and "gud 1ne, stoopid commy", I stated that respect is always earned, never given automatically, and that with people like him in the army, that the track record of no respect for the military would continue. I thanked him for making the point so succinctly, to which he continued throwing out every racial slur in the book (how I was supposed to be black/asian/native american/jewish/gay AND lesbian/retarded all at the same time, I'm not too sure), and told me he was going to come find me with his squad and kill me for being unAmerican. That last really astounded me and I paged a GM to personally report this death threat, obviously not meant as a joke. I'm hoping he'll pop a blood vessel in his brain when he finds out his account has been perma-banned and he'll have to spend another 100 dollars to get the game and all the expansions for a new account.
The US military has been involved in some pretty shameful and disgusting stuff over the last decade. I understand that there are a lot of servicepeople who enjoy their work, do it well, and with integrity and morality. I award respect to those people on an individual basis. Being in the US military does NOT, I repeat DOES NOT give you automatic respect. Your actions determine whether you're worthy of it. People like this make me ashamed to even identify myself to others as American, because this kind of phobic hatred and idiocy is much more prevalent in our society than rationality, intelligence, and acceptance.
That's all. Just wanted to rant about that since if I don't, I hold that anger in until it builds to an exploding point and I go off on someone that doesn't deserve it heh. WWII was probably the last major war we were in where I could say yes, US military members were worthy of that kind of reverence. Since then that automatic respect has gone way downhill, especially with the advent of 9/11 and the bullshit Iraq war. Respect is always earned, people. Otherwise it means absolutely JACK SHIT.
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