Be Neither Cynical nor Gullible

I have often NOT walked lock step in agreement with things our government does in my name. I trust but verify. The government in their infinite wisdom has done too many stupid things. I try hard to differentiate what they are in today's news. Thru a rearview mirror it's much easier. So, I try not to be taken in either by the left or right wing reactionaries to every event. I try to decipher my core and assess things from that vantage point.

I know Hutterites. They are OK. But this is really wrong.

In World War I (just to begin in the 20th century, and as a single example out of thousands from that era) a young Hutterite -- Hutterites are a German pacifist sect who immigrated to America to avoid conscription by the Kaiser and settled principally in the Dakotas -- a young Hutterite boy who refused military service for reasons of religious conviction, nevertheless agreed to do everything required of him by the Army except put on its uniform. Taken to the prison at Fort Leavenworth in the dead of Kansas winter, he was suspended for weeks by wrist-manacles from a pipe in a cellar with a foot of water on the floor. When he caught pneumonia and died, before his grief-stricken mother could arrive by train to claim her dead son's body, the Army buried it. In a uniform. L. Neil Smith, "You Can't Fight a Culture War If You Ain't Got Any Culture"