Dear Editor, I am writing in response to a letter printed in the
Aug. 21 edition of The Morgan Hill Times headlined Fahrenheit 9/11
not entertainment.
Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to a letter printed in the Aug. 21 edition of The Morgan Hill Times headlined Fahrenheit 9/11 not entertainment. I am very proud to say that my brother-in-law serves in the U.S. Marine Corps and was deployed in Iraq during all of the major combat.
I am truly disappointed and disgusted that the letter writer, as well as many others, cannot see the bitter prejudice and hatred the majority of our returning men and women face every day. To say that these men and women are narrow minded is an insult to their characters. How are they to know that when protesters hold signs against our president and against the war in Iraq, (such as “We support soldiers that kill our soldiers”) that the people holding the signs support them?
My dear brother-in-law is a very smart man with a very open mind. When he sees these groups of protesters he often approaches them to learn and debate their point of view, as his First Amendment rights allows him to do. He is often greeted with jeers and called many names, including the ever popular “Baby Killer.” Rarely do any of these protesters offer any insight into their beliefs, other than that they hate President Bush and they wish for the legalization of marijuana.
I am also disgusted by the notion that is implied at the end of that letter, that soldiers are nothing more than uneducated, brainwashed children. These men and women know the sacrifices they make when they join the service and the majority of them continue on to higher education and become successful members of society. But to claim that a college education might open their minds could not be further from the truth.
Being a senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I can say from first hand experience that members of the military, as well as their families are not welcomed nor respected on my college campus, or any others that I have visited. When the majority of the faculty, professors and students alike, routinely protest the war during class as well as after, how are our young men and women to know that they are supported? When these men and women are called murderers in class, how are they to develop an open mind? I know of many men and women who do not want to return to school for these very reasons. No one wants to be a part of an institution that is so firmly rooted against their own beliefs and their lives.
Finally, the notion that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 film was meant to educate the American people could not be further from the truth. When a movie is so blatantly filled with lies and half-truths only the weak-minded would follow such a bald faced work of propaganda. To follow one family out of the thousands of military families does not tell the whole story. To steal footage of a family’s private funeral for their son is not the work of a man who wishes to educate people, but the work of a man who saw an opportunity to take advantage of the Bush hatred that has gripped many parts of this country and to capitalize on it. It is also interesting to note that Moore’s film was first labeled a work of “fiction,” before he and his lawyers convinced the MPAA to change the label to “documentary.”
The men and women who are returning from war are not shown the respect and the admiration that they deserve. Their families are not shown the support that they deserve. Maybe it is not they who need to keep an open mind, but all of those people who loudly claim their support but whose actions denounce everything that these men and women stand for, fight for and believe in. May God bless our troops, and may God bless America.
Patricia Orlowski, Morgan Hill
