“Excuse me; aren’t you all fuckin’ hired killers?” (Bill Hicks)

Like everyone, I tend to overhear parts of other people's conversations in a number of different places during the course of my daily life. Occasionally I hear something that makes me smile ("Don't give me that Star Wars bollocks - it's totally over-rated. No way is it the greatest film ever made. Not even top ten.") Some of it makes me incandescent with bottled-up rage ("I stopped watching Eastenders ages ago - too many fucking foreigners. They should call it Wogstenders.") And sometimes I fail to understand it at all.

I recently heard someone talking, and talking, and talking about the army - someone in their family is in the armed forces. In the Middle East somewhere I think. They hear first hand about how bad it is out there - the death, the underfunding, the crippling tension, the pressure. And yet they appear to believe unthinkingly that whatever our army is doing out there, there is no question about its validity, its inherent rightness. Surely there's a need to question the obvious point of contention regarding the doubt about the reasons and the need to invade and occupy land out there? I guess if someone you love is involved in it, you would want to be convinced the conditions and the risk of death was a necessary evil to help the oppressed, and not an attempt to control resources and make money.

I don't question this person's obvious love for their family, and I accept that everyone should be permitted an opinion and the freedom to express it. What I do question, a little, is the wider issue of this blanket acceptance that every single member of the armed forces is a hero and the pressure to fall in with this propaganda-like generalisation. To express the kind of sentiment shown by the great Mr. Hicks is to be guilty of betraying your country and to become outcast. Just because I don't donate to Help for Heroes, read The Sun or hang the St. Georges Cross out my bedroom window with a patriotic tear in my eye (I wonder sometimes if some of the people doing this are simply so stupid they need reminding every morning what country they live in), and just because I don't consider killing other people necessarily heroic, it doesn't mean I side with the poppy-burning uber-fucks who like to scream loudly that the husbands and sons of grieving family members are burning in hell. Clearly the poppy-burners missed the point of Remembrance Day, which is to honour the sacrifice of an entire generation to keep us free of fascism, and not to support a misguided war effort in an attempt to lead the country down a route that will likely lead to ... fascism. So the poppy-burners are wrong, but so are the people that use Remembrance Day to support our current war effort (which couldn't be more different than WW2, and less essential).

Bill? Bill was, as ever, spot on.