To Hate or to See

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I've been lucky.

I often forget that many women don't know the world of men. I was brutally reminded when a woman wrote in the "letters to the editor" part of the newspaper to say how she didn't want to see our soldiers doing their route marches in their field gear on our city streets. She plainly hated those guys. I responded: "Eewww!"

I've been lucky to be from an extended family where several have us have done military service. Also lucky in that two of my brothers have done ranch work at cousin Betty Jean's, three of them have been in air cadets and four of them have worked in a remote mining camp. Between them they have been in at least five unions. I can't expect the average woman to have relatives who have stayed in bunkhouses. Nor can I expect a lady who has led a sheltered life to go down to mingle at her local pub.

(Beer)

She simply won't get to meet the men who may briefly lose a bit of their polish by going off to do bush surveying like my roommate, do forestry like my sister, or ocean fishing like my neighbor. And if she doesn't know or like those guys, then maybe she'll never like soldiers either.

I've been so lucky to be a bookworm with plenty of imagination: hence I can walk in another person's shoes. I mingle easily, I have to: As a writer it's my job to get to know people. I have enjoyed drinking beer with a university football player. Call him Sean. He confided that he had failed to measure up to the muddy hardworking roughnecks at a wellhead. In fact, he quit. Later Sean redeemed himself, in my eyes, by being the hardest worker on his roofing tar crew. It's a hot dirty job but Sean was always the first up the ladder. One day his boss whispered to him: "You are at the top of the list to be rehired next summer." ...I suspect no one else even made that list.

Among men, I suppose, a "wimp" is someone who doesn't even try, on the field of football or the field of life, to measure up.

Do girls wonder whether they will measure up, or are such worries only for boys? I don't suppose girls read war memoirs, or see war movies, or listen to their uncle's talk of surviving... but boys do, and they wonder. In WWII General Patton made a point of reassuring each incoming bunch of troops that they would do fine. He would add: "You will stop being afraid the first time you wipe off the blood from the man next to you. Then you'll just get angry." Patton had to speak plain and true because, in his time and place, the stakes were so high.

Soldiers in peacetime don't hate, any more than football players do. Players will aggressively practice to compete against a generic team; soldiers will train to fight a faceless abstraction, "the enemy."

(Library)

I can picture a sheltered lady in white gloves who is too busy to use her library card, too busy to become determined to "do whatever it takes" to understand men, let alone to understand soldiers. And that's OK. But to actively, openly, hate the sight of them the way that letter writer does? Eewww!

Hatred is a problem in this world. I can understand that housewives in other nations might "wimp out," might not make enough effort to conceal their hatreds from their children... Some may even actively teach their children to hate... But then what? Those submissive dutiful Arab mothers who plant seeds of hatred will harvest a bitter fruit. Children of Shiites and Sunnis will end up attacking Islam and blowing up each other's churches. That ain't good.

Approximately 350 mosques (churches) were attacked by terrorists in 2006 according to the U.S. government's e-journal.

It's a truism to me that if you relax and let in hated for one group, no matter how badly they deserve it, then you end up hating another group too. And then yet another. Show me someone who hates a visible minority and I will show you someone who hates an invisible minority. (such as gays, Jews or persons with disabilities)

I don't hate folks if I get to know them enough to take a good look at them.

Occasionally I have seen a bunch of soldiers shambling along the road in their rumpled field gear. I notice the tail end Charlie wearing a big orange triangle. (to alert traffic) I wonder if he is embarrassed: Can you spell target?... (Incidentally, my sister says her army cadets have written upon their triangle with a felt pen: Hit Me First) ...I've been watching Stargate SG-1 for ten seasons now, but instead of the futuristic European weapons from that show I see our boys carrying plain old army rifles. In place of television's tailored clothing I see outfits in the army's two sizes: too big and too small. No one is Hollywood handsome. Instead I see the homely interesting faces of our guys from weathered fishing villages and prairie towns. I see our boys doing a man's job for the first time in their lives. I wish them well.

Sean Crawford

Middle-aged now, in a quiet home

Spring 2008