your kid
I'm hoping I'll have time to work on this later, but...

There's another thing that is a spinoff of Cindy Sheehan's protests that annoys me, and it's pervasive.

I hate that the people killed there or serving there are constantly reffered to as "Children", or "Kids".

Yeah, they're somebody's kids. Strom Thrurmond was somebody's kid. I recognize that, at eighteen, they have not realized their full potential as an adult. They are still teenagers, and may be subject to the whims of adolescence. As many people are at 18, or 20, or, sometimes, 25 or 30.

But they are not children. They are well beyond the period where they need their parents to make every decision for them. They do not need to be coddled.

In many ways, they are more adults than many people older than them. They completed basic training. They showed up for deployment. They went out on the run that got them killed, because, for whatever reason, they decided to.

Reffering to them as "Kids" or "Children" is, in my mind, a disgrace. Saying they were "Sent" there, as lambs led to the slaughter, as preschollers are herded into the nap room, is absolutely wrong. It dimishes the sacrifice those people made.

They may be someone's "Children", but they are not Kids. Reffering to them in the diminutive is a ridiculous insult. They are not to be pitied as fools doing what they were told to do because they didn't know better. They are trained, intelligent adults, making the decisions they feel best, and they should be respected as such.  ¶ 4:35 AM