Wave the Bloody Shirt

Loss of a Child to gun violence is bad enough, and then having people who will not rationally consider reasonable gun control is disgustingly irrational in a Democracy.

Fly the bloody shirt. I do not have children of my own but if the children I have cared for over the years routinely were killed, like they are now I would be tempted if not driven to wave the Bloody Shirt of the child/youth/adult in front of those who turn a deaf ear to the reasonable regulation of Guns and other weapons.

I went to Vietnam. Not my choice but I learned that seeing war is very different that thinking about war in the abstract. I was a medic and I saw, touched, and carried the dead to graves registration. When war is made real to a person it is hard to rationalize the death and destruction of soldiers and others bodies. Seeing is believing even if is forced seeing.

Wave the Bloody Shirt, make those deaths, avoidable death, real and those lives loudly proclaimed as valuable and not some thing we can casually throw away and forget.

I was a Conscientious Objector in Vietnam and was a medic and soldier that did everything without carrying a gun that my fellow soldiers did. I claim nothing for me, I never killed anyone, but when you are part of a sordid system that casually supports death you see the world and the people in it differently. I love human beings - they are my species - and seeing what war does to them changed me.

I was a pacifist before I went to Vietnam, but just the knowledge that I did not kill does not change the fact I was part of the process of supporting the machinery of death. It is not just the death and destruction of the flesh. The most unnerving thing I saw was a young man who was brought to my work area with out a scratch on him. The first thing we did was to remove the clothing to see what needed to be fixed. This young man/boy wasn't there. His brain had shut down. He was for the time being Gone.

I think in the face of killing regardless of Who, When, Where, or Why, we need to remind people the reality of violent death of the innocent. Wave the Bloody Shirt.