What They Really Think
October 4, 2007
Recently, GOE was asked to help a patriot who had been countering a weekly protest in West Chester, PA. A retired Navy man, he had been the physical embodiment of the Lone Sailor, fighting the good fight, absorbing all manner of insult for having the temerity to hold signs that read, “Support Our Military Families,” while waving the flag. This past weekend GOE reinforced him in our own inimitable style.
Although there were no confrontations of any sort, and no issues with law enforcement, we received an email version of this “peace activist’s” newsletter. In it she likens us to some demonic horde. Apparently, our habit of wearing clothing that recognizes our military service is simply too much. Leather jackets are also off limits these days too. I won’t force you to read the entire vitriolic screed. Suffice it to say that not only do these people not Support the Troops, they loathe them, and us, for having served. In their minds, we are the problem, not the solution. Finally, one of them had the courage to go on record with their actual thoughts. In her own words she describes the actions of the day to her electronic newsletter list, which numbers in the hundreds. The excerpts below were selected at random. We have provided the entire “article” if you can stomach reading it. If you ever needed a reason to let our men and women in uniform know we support them here it is. This is what the anti-American activists really think. Manchu.
–”No, we haven’t ALL gone mad in this country, some of us are sane, some of us don’t want to destroy mankind.”
— “Instead, I saw raw hatred and death and destruction. I saw a glimpse of the coming end of the America I have loved all my life. I’m not sure if God will come back there. He may be gone forever. Countries and empires fall, and I think this one has seen its best days long ago.”
— “I saw old (my age) men who are still living the wet dreams of youth, decked out in grey beards on those wrinkled faces and leather and metal and waving Old Glory like swords, not like flags. Men who should know better, who should be at better places in their lives, men who should be making positive contributions to our young folks’ futures - but still searching to fulfill dreams that appear to be all they have left. Tragically, those old men’s wet dreams are now fulfilled only by sending off younger men to die. I am sad for them because they seem to have nothing better in their lives than feeding a hungry and hateful war machine, singing praises to tragedy and destruction, and feeding their young to the very jaws of hell.”
— “But, as sad and pitiful as those men are, the death-cheering women are always the most disturbing, the scariest, their hardened and wrinkled faces showing hatred that mothers and daughters just shouldn’t show. I grew up with women like that, often wrinkled and wizzened by tobacco and alcohol and sun and poverty and despair in Appalachian coal country. They were my aunts and neighbors and cousins. Someone said to me, “Why do those women look so much more hateful even than the men? So much more disturbing than the men? So ugly with their hate?” It’s like they purposely put on makeup that makes them hateful and ugly instead of what I think (stereotyping, I know) most women want to be - soft and loving and kind. I answered, “Have you ever seen films of KKK women? Same impression - they appear to be so much more hideous because women just aren’t supposed to be that way.”
–” And I’ll try to forget the spectacle that took over that corner today, the forces of sheer death that came there. I’ll try to forget the hardened faces looking out of those cars and their cheers for war and death and organized, legalized murder, their hatred of “Arabs” and “Muslims” and “jihad” and everything that’s not them. I’ll try to forget those men who don’t want to grow old, who want to relive their youths through sending their own sons to die because they seem to have nothing else; oh, and I’ll try to forget even more those women…those sad, sad women (and I’ll thank God every day I didn’t become one of them).”
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Full original post:
For five years, I’ve seen only peace and love on that corner at High and Market Streets. God has been with us every week when we gather there, a sacred place to us. It’s been our church, our place for sending a positive, life-giving message to the world. Our way of saying, “No, we haven’t ALL gone mad in this country, some of us are sane, some of us don’t want to destroy mankind.”
But God wasn’t there today for me, and I can only hope He will return.
Instead, I saw raw hatred and death and destruction. I saw a glimpse of the coming end of the America I have loved all my life. I’m not sure if God will come back there. He may be gone forever. Countries and empires fall, and I think this one has seen its best days long ago.
What happened at that corner today was a grim and disgusting spectacle, a docudrama of the absurd I can only call “The End of America,” a country wallowing in its growing hate and fear. A country self-destructing. My country dying.
I saw old (my age) men who are still living the wet dreams of youth, decked out in gray beards on those wrinkled faces and leather and metal and waving Old Glory like swords, not like flags. Men who should know better, who should be at better places in their lives, men who should be making positive contributions to our young folks’ futures - but still searching to fulfill dreams that appear to be all they have left. Tragically, those old men’s wet dreams are now fulfilled only by sending off younger men to die. I am sad for them because they seem to have nothing better in their lives than feeding a hungry and hateful war machine, singing praises to tragedy and destruction, and feeding their young to the very jaws of hell.
One of our group wasn’t there this morning but came this afternoon. He had been at the military funeral of a soldier who had committed suicide in Iraq. Those grey-bearded men in their leather jackets and metal studs, with their phallic motorcycles with hideous roaring engines continue to send off young men to die like that, or to return, broken shells of themselves, with the rationalization that they have already “served their time, served their country,” so it’s OK to sacrifice their young to keep alive their never-ending wet dreams. It’s OK, they say, to send off their young to “die for their country” for they seem to have no idea (or simply can’t face the fact) that they are only pawns in a hideous game played by powerful entities that see them only as red meat, cannon fodder, targets, sinew and bones, body bags, graves, memories, economic factors of war production. But, of course, they’re all “for the troops,” and we aren’t, don’t you know?
But, as sad and pitiful as those men are, the death-cheering women are always the most disturbing, the scariest, their hardened and wrinkled faces showing hatred that mothers and daughters just shouldn’t show. I grew up with women like that, often wrinkled and wizzened by tobacco and alcohol and sun and poverty and despair in Appalachian coal country. They were my aunts and neighbors and cousins. Someone said to me, “Why do those women look so much more hateful even than the men? So much more disturbing than the men? So ugly with their hate?” It’s like they purposely put on makeup that makes them hateful and ugly instead of what I think (stereotyping, I know) most women want to be - soft and loving and kind. I answered, “Have you ever seen films of KKK women? Same impression - they appear to be so much more hideous because women just aren’t supposed to be that way.” They’re downright scary. Women are supposed to be motherly and loving and peaceful and all things nurturing and kind - not tools who gladly send off their young sons to die horrible deaths based on lies and deception. If women agree to this horror, what hope is there for the world? They feed their children, willingly, to an insatiable beast called war, to an insatiable beast that rapes them as they smile and takes everything they have, that robs them of their beauty and will send them to their graves in mass ignorance. On one level, I feel so very sorry for them. On another level, they are frightening as harbingers of the very worst mankind has to offer.
Rich, your daughter appears to be potentially quite a lovely young woman, yet in the three weeks I’ve seen her, I’ve never seen her smile, and she never
speaks - not once. She has a hardened expression, an incessantly unemotional expression painted on her young face like a mask. Are you really, as her father, content to let her age and become like the others - hard, time-worn faces, angry words, walking to the chant of “Kill, kill, kill; maim, murder, bomb, shoot!” Will she send her own son/s/daughter/s, your own grandson/s/daughter/s off to war “for the good of the country” to die to line rich men’s purses? For oil or whatever else they need to sate themselves with the unholy goals of mammon? So rich men and women can just buy more, more, more?I feel so sad every time I see her young face because I wonder if she even has a chance. She’s still young enough to avoid that fate, but only if someone shows her the way.
Sometimes I lie awake late into the night, often thinking, “Oh, what do I care, anyway? This country’s on a slippery slope to inevitable destruction, I can’t change it, so who-the-hell cares?” My son once in a while, in a fit of his own discouragement, in a lapse of the eternal hope of his youth, will say, “Mom, the people in this country are so incredibly stupid, so ignorant - they just don’t care. So stop killing yourself over it. You can’t change it - they just won’t listen. They don’t want to know anything!” But, then, a short while later, he will plead with me, “But, Mom, please keep doing what you’re doing. Please try to stop this madness - for us!” He sounds so desperate as he sees what lies ahead for this country. Unlike my generation, with such hope, this new generation has dwindling hope for this country. They have inherited one screwed-up America .
So I’ll try to get some sleep, and I’ll wake up again. And I’ll wearily try to think about what to do next. How to hang in. How to pick up the pieces again. How to get God back into this picture (come on, God, can’t ya come back?). I’ll get up and realize that I have no choice but to keep on keepin’ on. I’ll read Gandhi, I’ll read Martin Luther King, I’ll read the Bible. And I’ll try to forget the spectacle that took over that corner today, the forces of sheer death that came there. I’ll try to forget the hardened faces looking out of those cars and their cheers for war and death and organized, legalized murder, their hatred of “Arabs” and “Muslims” and “jihad” and everything that’s not them. I’ll try to forget those men who don’t want to grow old, who want to relive their youths through sending their own sons to die because they seem to have nothing else; oh, and I’ll try to forget even more those women…those sad, sad women (and I’ll thank God every day I didn’t become one of them).
The woman with the t-shirt, “Proud to Support Bush,” was particularly disturbing to me. I could overlook the women in the leather and metal and the
down-home weariness of their faces. But proud to support a village idiot from Texas who never had to work for anything in his life, who would never
even let her tie his shoelaces, who was his own father’s acknowledged trouble-maker-son whom he had to hide to escape embarrassment, who grew p with a silver spoon in his mouth and a blank check in his hand, who fakes a down-home Texas demeanor when he’s anything but down-home, who couldn’t manage (or think) his way out of a paper bag, who is a dry drunk and real war criminal who should be in prison for all the death he has caused - and who would send, with no conscience, that woman’s own loved ones off to die to enrich himself and his oil crony friends? Oh, what’s wrong with that woman, anyway? How can she be so blind? How can she be so damned stupid? It’s maddening. But I can’t worry about her tonight. I spent years wondering “Where were all the good Germans? How did they let it happen?” Sadly, in the past five years, I have seen the enemy, and he is us.And I can’t worry about the old guy with the white hair and the matching white t-shirt with “Hillary” and a hammer and sickle on it - probably the most
flagrant showing of downright ignorance I saw all day yesterday. That guy has no idea how wrong that shirt looks and is, how it has no basis in reality. And he’ll never talk about it. He’s probably a nice guy who’s been totally brainwashed and will just “never know what hurts him.” He’ll never know the forces that control his life, wash his brain, chew up his heart, and spit it out. Has he ever read The Gulag Archipelago, has he ever read about Stalin? Has he ever really known what that hammer and sickle were all about? Does he know that to compare Hillary Clinton and the Soviet disaster is beyond stupid? And does he even know the Soviet Union no longer exists? Does he know the Cold War is over? Does he even know anything about Hillary Clinton except what that highly paid, rich purveyor of all that is hate, Rush Limbaugh, spews on the radio day-in, day-out?Both these people in their sloganeered t-shirts are unwitting participants in the destruction of all we hold dear in this country. That spectacle had nothing to do with the West Chester I know, the West Chester we all hold dear. Most of them didn’t raise their kids here, they don’t go to our churches and synagogues and mosque and meetings, they don’t go to our schools, they don’t live in our neighborhoods. They swooped into this community like vultures with red-white-and-blue wings on roaring and bullying black steeds and then flew off leaving their message of violence and hatred. People I have known for years in this community drove by, stopping at the light, and looked at me with “What IS this?” looks - what’s going on in OUR community? Who ARE these people? I had no good answer for them.
I need sleep.
And I need to be able to get up tomorrow and do the Groundhog-Day-movie routine, get up and do this all over again, as I have for five long years, day in and day out. I need to care enough to keep going.
So that one day my son can know that his mother never stopped trying to bring God back to that corner.
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12 Responses to “What They Really Think”
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Might some kind soul in her community read her rants, guide her off the corner into a mental health program.
No expert,..but this lady had problems far behond the current war on terror.
Please repost her rants,..send them to civic leaders in her community.
What is this piece-of-work’s name and contact info? I’d like to write her an email of love and enlightenment.
Rich,
Way to go! Looks like you got her/their attention!
If she thinks she was upset by last weekend’s events and turnout of oppoing voices she should really have her undies in a bundle this coming weekend, and the next and the next and the next …………
I find it ironic and even troubling that this woman has a problem with your right to express an opposing opinion while she stands within miles of Constitution Hall and the Liberty Bell. Please note I said troubling and ironic, not surprising!!!
And then she hurls personal insults to further her cause. How sad, no let’s make that pathetic! When she speaks of village idiots perhaps she should look in a mirror.
Keep up the good work Rich. It is about time “they” realized there is another point of view. We have listened to their appeasement rhetoric long enough. We will be silent no more!
We actually remember the Cole, 9-11 and all the rest. Enough is enough!!
Soapbox
IF NOT US, WHO? IF NOT KNOW, WHEN?
BRAVO ZULU to the West Chester EAGLES.
She is right - we are NOT Arab
we are NOT Muslim
waging Jihad is NOT us !!!
SHE is the one who is against what she is not - Motorcyclists
Anti-communists
Patriots
Free speech and right of
Assembly in defense of what she
is not !!
To all the West Chester Eagles,
Just know that we’re all with you in Spirit. Keep fighting the good fight and never ever surrender to the Lunatic Fringe.
For the Lady posting the long depressing comment above,
I’m one of those “Old Men” you are refering to.
The Hatred you see is from years of watching people like you, Code Pink, ANSWER , MAS, CAIR, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Murtha, Hillary Clinton and basically the entire Democratic Party and most of the MSM rant and rave and do everything you can to tear this country apart and surrender to the Jihad.
Everytime you and your Comrads run your mouths in the Media it feeds the enemy and gives them more strength to fight on against your own troops.
WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION LADY?!?!?!?!?!?
We all came together in January to say nuffs enough.
Get off our Presidents back and let our Troops finish their Mission. That’s all we want.
You and everyone like you are starting to understand that there is another side to America.
The side that holds the True Patriots and not a bunch of whiney ass pukes that are blinded by Professional Politicians and don’t have sense enough to figure it out for yourselves.
By the way. I was born and raised in the Appalacian Coal country. Not far from where Chuck Yeager grew up in Hamlin.
Not everybody that lives in this part of the country grow up to be as Ignorant as you obviously have.
Matter of fact, West Virginia has had more men serve in the Military, per capita, than any other State.
You are giving my State a bad name with your dimwitted rants so the next time you want to ramble on and on keep My State out of it.
Do You Understand or do i have to repeat myself??
I was very naive when I went to my first rally in West Chester to support Rich Davis, and I brought along my very docile 3 yr old German Shepherd Maggie. Later I saw a video of that day with the protesters gathered, saying nasty things about the dog. Talking badly about Maggie can really piss me off. Then, I just read the letter from the protesters and finally realized how evil the anti-war group is. These ‘peaceful’ people seem to be out for blood. I’ll proudly shed my blood to protect the Constitution, and out troops fighting for our Country in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope to see all you Eagles in West Chester, PA on Saturday. Bud
I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. UGH.
Karen’s rant is based on her pre-formed opinions, despite having spent time in close contact wiht those she derides.
You are not going to open this permanently closed mind. Her words belie her stance of ‘pro-peace’ - and with every newsletter she writes, her own words destroys her credibility in the eyes of moderats and independent thinkers.
This is a woman that would attempt to impound a veterans dog to prove the ‘peacefulness’ of herself and her followers.
Way to go W Chester Eagles!!! If this woman took so much of her time to write this up, you really go under her skin.
She is right about one thing though…God has abandoned “her” corner. He now resides peacefully on the Eagles side of the street!
For Karen: I am one of those “hardened, wrinkled women” you speak so lowly of. The hardness you see in our eyes is resolve dear, the wrinkles are from years of love and laughter. Women don’t have to be soft to be mothers or to be women. WE can hold our own. We can love with the best of them, we can fight with the best of them and when shit hits the fan, as it will if your “peace” side gets it’s way, we’ll be the ones you’ll turn to because you have spent your life being soft.
What you call ugly, we think is beautiful. We are full of passion, honor, intergrity, pride, hope, wisdom, respect and dignity. The hate that you teach your child each week from your self placed pedestal will do her no good in the real world. Teach her instead, love, honor, duty, respect and most of all…teach her to fight for what SHE believes in. Not what YOU believe in.
First HURRAH!!!! for the Pennsylvania Eagles. Wish I could have stood with you, but health,conditions and distance exclude me at this time. Second this “woman” is a low grade moron obviously, like most of her crowd freedom of speech is okay as long as you agree with them otherwise you should not be allowed to speak, they think. She and others like her believe in peace at any price. We however understand that the only peace worth having is “PEACE WITH HONOR!!!” anthing else you just might as well “rest in peace”. A phrase has been quoted here before and I will quote it again “I would rather die standing up fighting than live on my knees”. I don’t think any Eagles bombed any Mid East trade centers and killed thousands of civilians. I don’t remeber any American Vets beheading hostages. Do I “HATE” people who do that ? You bet your A** I do! Last point, this “woman” talks about God and a corner being her church. Maybe you Pennslvania Patriots should sing her the “Battle Hymn of the republic” the next time. In particular the soldiers version. The song as originally sung by the general pulic had the verse “As he (Jesus)died to make men holy let us fight to make men free”. The version sung by Union soldiers Was “As he(Jesus) died to make men holy let us die to make men free” His truth is marching on! She won’t understand I’m sure but I’d sure like a picture of the look on her face if she heard it. This is what Eagles, Freedom’s watch and all the other pro American Patriot groups have to do is let these people know we won’t let them run the show anymore! We are going to speak out and be heard!
“NO SURRENDER, NO RETREAT!”
Would you like to live in a country where everyone agreed? Pretty scary! It’s all the different ideas that energize a democratic country. And, hopefully, keep it from going to far in any one direction. Dissent is an essential ingredient for a healthy democracy. After all, what’s the first thing a dictator wants eliminate? So why all the anger, hatred, and name calling? I think the rude behavior is immature, not very intelligent, and counterproductive. There have been many unfair and (allow me to be blunt) ridiculous statements made on both sides. How is this helpful?