Monthly Archives: August 2024

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by Reid Fitzsimons

Once in a while you’ll see an older guy in a store wearing a hat the says Vietnam Veteran. If you do consider this for a moment, you’ll probably assume he is, indeed, a Vietnam vet. If you pause a little longer, you might imagine what a profound impact this experience must have had on him over a half century ago when he was a young man, perhaps just out of high school. I fear the significance of serving in a war is being lost on us as a society overall, relegated more to a video game mindset: The share of the U.S. population with military experience has declined, according to data from the US Census Bureau. In 1980, about 18% of U.S. adults were veterans, but that share fell to 6% in 2022.

Tim Walz photo from Army basic training 1981; wow: on the right the corresponding photo of me from1976

There is a person named Tim Walz, the current governor of MN who was recently declared to be the Democrat’s candidate for Vice President. While Waltz is among the most extreme leftists in the Democrat party, he fits the bill for a slightly older non-homosexual white guy, designed to balance the ticket headed by a lady who is pretty much white but portrays herself as black, and is an equally extreme leftist. This article, however, is not to discuss the extremism of this duo and the party they represent, but to explore a specific fraud they hope will be ignored or successfully glossed over, that being Walz’s military service. It should be acknowledged without reservation that he was a member of the Army National Guard for 24 years. He retired in May 2005, and came darn close to having served honorably.

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by Reid Fitzsimons (Preface: The word “culture” is used frequently; perhaps overused. We have cultural icons, cultural appropriation, and culture wars; a privileged person might view his or herself as being highly cultured for listening to NPR or patronizing expensive sushi bars, and we have cultures associated with black, white and every skin tone in between. In reality it’s difficult to define the word, but I recall the professor from my Cultural Anthropology 101 class at the University of Wyoming in 1977, who succinctly stated culture is “learned behavior.”

In order to make the point of this article I need to be a little autobiographical. I was raised in the almost exclusively white Maryland suburbs outside of Washington, DC. While wealth is always relative, we were certainly well off, not country club/private school rich (there were plenty of those households around), but we had a spacious house, two cars, membership in a community swimming club with tennis courts, and took family vacations. The typical and expected trajectory was to complete high school, graduate from college, perhaps go to grad school to become a lawyer, accountant, or obtain an MBA, get a well paying job, start a family in a nice house in the suburbs, and repeat the cycle.

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