Shameless

I am trying to image identifying as a decorated combat veteran. Let’s say I go online and buy a secondhand military uniform and a few old medals that were awarded for valour. Then I create a Facebook page giving my biography and describing my imagined battlefield heroics. Then I dress myself up all nice and soldierly.

I then live, publicly, as though I were Sgt. York reborn.

Not only that, I insist that you go along with the fiction. You have to treat me like I am a hero, because after all, I identify as one.

Would I not be the poster child of shamelessness? What would have to be wrong with me to be able to do that?

Now, assuming that I am not just nuts, and thus given a pass on everything as long as I am not violent, why would my acting like a war hero be shameful. What difference would it make?

I think it certainly would to those men that actually are. That actually did the deed. That in the face of extraordinary danger were able to cast aside terror and panic and do that thing that earned them the special recognition that We the People are wise to bestow on our actual super heroes.

We do so because to be grateful is a normal and healthy human emotion that benefits the giver as well as the recipient. It is also a sign of tribal cohesion. But also because we will need lots heroes in the future, and the recognition that we will bestow now is worth more than a truckload of gold to the young man who in his adolescent imaginings sees himself in shining armour (or decked out like Rambo) playing the hero, winning the girl, and returning home in a shower of triumphal confetti. We need those that are beardless today, to be highly motivated to face what threatens We the People tomorrow, when their turn comes.

And nothing motivates the martially inclined young man like the respect of his tribe or the adoration of the ladies.

I’d sooner be able to go to Walmart in speedos and flip flops than to insult the memory of real heroes or devalue the honour that we hold out to future heroes by pretending to be one. To do so would strike at the very nature of the idea.

So. That sad broken boy at Penn State.

It is one thing to be a man and desire to be a girl. It is another to imagine that you are in fact a girl. And yet another to dress up like a girl, go out in public, and expect to be treated like one. I cant help but to feel sorry for him and wonder what happened to him when he was little, or what needful thing was lacking that turned him so.

But to actually join the girls swim team, beat the stuffings out of the best female swimmers, and then be proud of it?

My friends, he is in fact the poster child of shamelessness.

M.C. Atkins

Follow me on Facebook by clicking here.

P.S. One of my daughters sent me this meme. This, is actually a joke. At least for now.