Out of the mouth of the ignorant comes ignorance!

“Wise people talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something”
-Plato


Recently certain “personalities” (I will not dignify them by using their names) on the Fox news network took a few swipes at the Canadian Armed Forces and by extension the Government and people of Canada. These luminaries of the broadcast media decided that for the edification of their audience that they would make light this countries ongoing and steadfast commitment to the military efforts in Afghanistan. For those who are unaware of what that commitment is I’ll spare you the full details and sum it up in one short sentence:

As of today it’s a total of 116 body bags!

The reaction up here of course while predictable is also quite understandable.

Outrage!

I’ve heard a number of people out and about trying to make sense of these crass remarks and ultimately many quite sadly seem to be shrugging their shoulders and writing it off as another example of the stereotypical Americans being loud, boorish, uniformed and obnoxious. It’s a tempting and easy conclusion to make.
But my friends to do so would see us as not only individuals but as a nation paying an equally undeserved disservice to our American cousins.

If we must use the descriptors of loud, boorish, uniformed and obnoxious apply them instead to the deserving individual’s whose oafish conversation and so called wit spewed forth the offensive remarks not Americans in general.

I have worked both with Americans and in the U.S. itself in both civilian and military roles. Within my experience the average person I encountered was to say the least the epitome of manners, polite curiosity and respect to not only me as a soldier and a Canadian citizen, but anyone they spoke to regardless of where they happened to be from and what they did for a living. But let’s face the fact in any group of people there are always expectations, and the trash making up the fox program “Red Eye” on that particular night is an example of just that, the exception! They do not in my mind represent the thoughts our opinions of Americans in general.

So to the speakers on the night in question on the Red Eye program I ask what do you think would have happened to you had you taken a similar swipe at the brave men and women of your own military services who are brought home to rest and refit between combat tours? Do any of you have military experience that qualifies you to have an opinion on these types of affairs or are you simply just another bunch of bottom feeding cowardly couch jockeys so lacking in any other useful skills that this is the best you can do in life? Just wondering!

In the end and also quite predictable those involved just couldn’t shut up and had to make it worse with a half baked apology that was almost as insulting as their original remarks. So please in response to your response allow me to make a suggestion for your future remarks and shows. Consider limiting your comments to subjects you actually know something about. Of course if my present estimation of your respective intellects holds true that would mean we could all expect blessed silence in your time slot for the foreseeable future. I’d pay to watch that!


In closing and as a side note I offer the following to anyone interested in a quick read. It's an article I reprinted in a blog post last Remembrance Day when it was sent to me; it says more than I ever could! Keep in mind it was apparently written some time ago and the references to the 4 grieving families was sadly repeated once more just this weekend past.


A Salute to a Brave and Modest Nation LONDON –

Until the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack.

More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated -- a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality -- unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves -- and are unheard by anyone else -- that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth -- in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace -- a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbor has given it in Afghanistan?

Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honorable things for honorable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun.

It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honor comes at a high cost. This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.