Support The Troops. Send Them To College!

Like my good friend watertiger, I, too, had a dad who served in World War II (he joined up right out of high school and spent the war in the Pacific) and then came back to take advantage of the original GI Bill. He was the first in his family of English/Welsh immigrants to go to college and, even with the GI Bill, he worked his way through college, cooking breakfast, as his store of hysterical stories assured that I'd remember, for a women's dorm. My dad was a journalism major, back in the days before spellcheck, and I still remember him telling me how the dean called him in and told him that he was going to have to learn to spell if he wanted a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He must have learned, somehow, because he fed a family of five kids on nothing but his writing, sent all of us to college, left money for my mom to live on after he died, and left me enough inheritance for a lovely diamond dragonfly brooch.

My Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, has proposed that America, again, begin awarding our soldiers a full GI Bill. After dad's first-ever-in-his-family college degree, I stumbled my way into a masters degree and a juris doctor degree, largely still running on the strength of the impetus from Dad's GI Bill's push forward. Son, whose granddad helped move him into Princeton, earned degrees from that school and a law degree. We've paid commensurate taxes ever since. Goddess knows what G/Son will do. It was a good investment that America made in the late 1940s. It would be a good investment here at the end of aughts. Course, as watertiger notes, Republicans like Five-Deferments-Dick and John Sideny McCain are opposed to that expense. Fuckers. Why do Republicans hate the troops.