Found poetry

A lot of people don't pay much attention to the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. To many they are little more than an excuse for a three-day weekend, they have something to do with the military and beyond that the distinctions blur. Well here's the difference. Veterans Day honors those who served in the military and Memorial Day honors those who died while in military service.

You'd think someone who wears American flag bling and is paid exorbitant speaking fees to question the legitimacy of others' patriotism would be able to tell the two days apart. But it seems Sarah Palin can't.

So on Memorial Day weekend she tweeted the following:



There's a number of things wrong here, not all of which are obvious at first. First, her all-caps reliance on VETERANS and VETS is the kind of thing you'd expect her to tweet on Veterans Day and not Memorial Day. It wouldn't surprise me that she's one of those folks who doesn't know the difference between the two.

But if she does know the difference, then she's picked an odd weekend to randomly tweet about what she feels veterans mean to society. Talking about service members who died while in the military makes a lot more sense to me on Memorial Day weekend.

Then there's the matter of what she's actually saying. That veterans "give" us the freedom of the press, the right to vote and to peaceably assemble. And she specifically says these rights come from vets, "not politicians" among others. I'm calling horseshit on that.

First of all, they are rights and not gifts. Second, vets (and those who died while serving) have done many things. You can definitely say they support and defend those rights, and sometimes died defending them. But they did not "give" them to anyone. On the contrary, those rights can be found in amendments to the U.S. Constitution. So if you want to be picky about where those rights came from, they came from politicians. Politicians who were elected by a popular vote of the people.

We the people, Sarah. We the people have the power to enshrine rights in the Constitution. We do it by electing people who will do as we ask, and they codify those rights we feel are important.

And that's the whole point to a representative democracy. If members of the military were deciding what rights people had, that's usually called a plutocracy. We don't have one of those.

But here's my favorite thing. The ALL CAPS SHOUT OUT TO VETERANS portion of her tweets? That's not even her writing. She stole that from a poem written by U.S. Army vet Charles Province called "It Is The Soldier."

It is the Soldier, not the minister
Who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer
Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, not the politician
Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.

It wasn't all copying and pasting over at the Walled Wasilla Compound this weekend. That she changed "soldiers" to "vets" or "veterans" really jumped out at me, and it's why it seems that she may be conflating Veterans Day and Memorial Day. She made a point of wedging the V-word in there for some reason, right?

Well I hope Mr. Province is flattered that Palin decided to plagiarize his poem (or, at the very least, copy from it liberally, ahem, and not credit him). Because if he's upset, she'll find that it's the VETERAN, not the half-term governor, who has given us copyright law.