{"id":15817,"date":"2009-11-27T10:11:13","date_gmt":"2009-11-27T15:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=15817"},"modified":"2009-11-27T10:11:13","modified_gmt":"2009-11-27T15:11:13","slug":"a-cartoonist-meets-our-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=15817","title":{"rendered":"A cartoonist meets our troops"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephan Pastis<\/a>, the creator of the comic strip “Pearls Before Swine”, recently went on a tour for the USO in the Middle East along with nine other cartoonists and met our troops. He discovered what most of us here at TAH already know;<\/p>\n

I have never been thanked by anyone as I was by those soldiers we visited in hospitals and on military bases. Their thanks were as sincere and heartfelt as anything I\u2019ve ever heard. And as much as it was for our being cartoonists whose strips they might enjoy, I think it was also simply because we were there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wish I could introduce them to you. They were sincere and direct and respectful to a degree I have never experienced in my day-to-day life here. And if something were to have posed a threat to any of us while we were there, I had no doubt they would have protected us before they protected themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Every morning, I groan while getting out of my bed knowing that I have to face a day with the latte-drinking crowd and I miss the mornings when I bounded from my bed at oh-dark-thirty looking forward to my day (weeks, months) ahead that I’d spend among soldiers. I’m glad that Mr. Pastis believes the gap between the troops and the latte crowd is bridgeable, and I’d like to share his optimism, but I don’t hold out much hope.<\/p>\n

The latte crowd prefers to see the troops as victims of George Bush, of a failed education system, of predatory recruiters, of jingoistic neo-cons – that way the latte crowd doesn’t have to accept the fact that there are things in this country worth dying and sacrificing. That there are people in this country who put other things above SELF.<\/p>\n

People who have never spent a day in uniform think that sacrifice means watching the news a few times every week and being subjected to homogenized images of war. I’ve heard them tell recovering wounded soldiers that “we’ve all lost things in this war” when the only thing they’ve given up is cheap coffee and common sense.<\/p>\n

Thanks to David Marron of The Thunder Run<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephan Pastis, the creator of the comic strip “Pearls Before Swine”, recently went on a tour … A cartoonist meets our troops<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,18,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberals-suck","category-support-the-troops","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}