Enough, America. Stop Talking About Election Day Revolution. By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Defense One
America's pretend soldiers are threatening to cross the line from dissent to insurrection on Tuesday. America's military is not.
Armed insurrection. Rigged elections. Revolution. The threat of violence spilling into the streets if one candidate wins and another loses. What country are we speaking about? Not the ones in which our service members are serving. Not Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria. We’re talking about ours. The divided United States of America.
Right now some Americans talk a lot about supporting the troops yet undermine those soldiers’ oaths by threatening an armed insurgency against civilian rule. They ignore the generals and admirals who are publicly pledging they will do their jobs on Wednesday no matter who wins Tuesday. Why the divide, then?
We are a nation whose militarily leaders speak from hard-won experience about the limits of what force can achieve on the battlefield, but whose civilians — most of whom have never gone to war — sound off, full of bravado about what force could bring on the homefront. We are a country that barely looks up long enough to take a breath when its service members are killed in action because most citizens have no skin in the game whatsoever when it comes to its conflicts. We are a nation where too many civilians are quick to talk about taking up arms against one another if things don’t go their way in the battlefield of politics.
Enough, America. If you want to honor your service members, your nation’s history of military leadership in the world, then honor the civilian-led democracy it serves…