Yesterday I got in a wee shouting
match with one who thinks Secretary Clinton a really wonderful presidential
candidate, as I do not. Pledging (as one says at a moment like this) to “fight
back to back” for Secretary Clinton against those of us who prefer Bernie
Sanders, he invoked his service in Vietnam. I thanked him for his service (as
one does at such a moment, albeit usually far less sarcastically), and mused
that the world was surely a much better place for it. In response, he sputtered
something about how if I were to mock a current member of Our Armed Forces, he
(his chosen pronoun) would surely rip my head off and shit down my neck.
My inference was that homicidal
violence is an appropriate response to an expression of a point of a view
different from one’s own. Or maybe that response is permitted only Those Who
Serve in deference to their putting themselves in mortal jeopardy to Protect
Our Freedoms.
Perhaps the most important of
which, as I’ve always understood it, is the freedom to express one’s self
without fear of having his head pulled off.
Confused!
