Brooks: We Are Not All Heroes
This past Veterans Day, I was overwhelmed with the amount of support from people who took the time to honor our veterans, past and present. I received personal notes from friends who only wished to let me know that they were thinking of me that day. However, the appreciation and respect of the general public must be tempered lest members in the veteran community develop a sense of superiority or entitlement. David Masciotra’s sensational Salon article titled “You don’t protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracy” could have addressed this problem but instead detracted from a productive dialogue by waging a semantic argument about what constitutes a hero and whether our wars were just — he even delved into police tactics.