What Matters

October 30, 2009

Cassandra, who starts out quoting, but work your way out of the next of blockquotes, and then go read the whole thing, and follow her links:

Before Bush left the meeting, he paused in the middle of the room and said to the families, “I will never feel the same level of pain and loss you do. I didn’t lose anyone close to me, a member of my family or someone that I love. But I want you to know that I didn’t go into this lightly. This was a decision that I struggle with every day.”

As he spoke, Ascione could see the grief rising through the president’s body. His shoulder slumped and his face turned ashen. He began to cry and his voice choked. He paused, tried to regain his composure and looked around the room. “I am sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said.

But this is more ‘reality’ than the reality based community is ready for. It conflicts with how they wish to see the world - a stark, black and white version of The Truthiness in which it becomes more comforting to believe that our leaders are callous and cold (no matter how many military families say that’s untrue), that they lie (no matter that the official record says otherwise), that they are using our military (no matter that our armed forces are all volunteer and that they keep volunteering).

When hatred is so strong that its adherents fear the truth, no factual rebuttal is likely to pierce the wall of lies that surrounds the willfully ignorant. But the truth remains, regardless of their stubborn refusal to admit it.

I was lucky enough to meet the President of the United States not once, but three times during my husband’s last deployment to Iraq. The third time he was slightly late.

You see, he’d been talking with a Gold Star family in the Oval Office just moments before he met with us and appeared on national TV. And just as he did when he met with Rachel Ascione, he gave them all the time they needed.

No one who has ever seen the President in the company of our armed forces or their families could doubt the genuine love and respect he felt for us. And that feeling was mutual. It mattered. It gave me comfort during those long, dark months when my husband was on the other side of the world. And that’s a comfort I no longer feel from a President whose idea of supporting the troops consists of turning their homecoming into a photo op.

UPDATE: Turns out, Big O’s visit wasn’t a photo op, after all. I know, because I didn’t read it in the New York Times.

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