Face Value...

... an opinion piece. A rarity here.

Something has been bugging me for a few days and it takes a lot to have that kind of effect on me. Normally I just shrug things off and accept the whatever as it is. Prior to starting writing here almost two years ago, I probably wouldn't even have considered bringing anything that bothered me up in conversation.

I have mentioned before that I don't have a whole heck of a lot of memories from my childhood, just a smattering here and there, vignettes... snapshots of things in  my head. Somethings I know have just been shoved aside in my brain to make room for current items, but the memories themselves just aren't readily available. All I know is that I know the lessons I learned as a kid, mostly before the age of 7 and probably all before the age of 10. One of these lessons was not to take anything at face value.

Whenever you see the words true, real, lite and free, you know that there is no way that they are in fact what they purport to be. There may be a grain of truth to content, but not as a whole. The other day I wrote a rather rambling bit about a few things, and in my journey agoogling at the time, I came across some video footage on the sidebar with the word "vrai" in it. "Vrai" being the French word for "true". Of course, I wasn't sure "which" truth it would be, but I felt compelled to watch. It was "Le vrai visages des Talibans". I wasn't going to write about this and was actually tempted to send off the link to another blog and leave it at that, but as I said, this has been bugging me. Whether or not the men in that country had fought wars with the British, whether or not they were funded, trained and armed by the U.S. government to fight the Russians, whether or not coalition forces should be fighting and dying over there still is neither here nor there. Never take "vrai" at face value. Never take anything at face value.

There are three parts to the video, and all three must be viewed to get the full picture, and you have to listen carefully, or read carefully. Are they fighting for their land? Yes. Their God? Yes. Their freedom? Yes. Are they fighting for their country? In my humble opinion? No. They fight for control of it, but not on behalf of all the nation's peoples. Are they religious fanatics? But.. they just seem to be such peace-loving people... with big guns. This is a French journalist. Yes, journalists by nature are supposed to be unbiased, but... the thing that has been bugging me is that this video contains an attack called in on coalition forces... American troops.... France is part of the coalition forces. Four French soldiers were recently killed by an Afghan soldier ("French officials said an Afghan man in army uniform suddenly turned and opened fire on unarmed French soldiers during a sports training exercise on Thursday, killing four and wounding 16 others." (I'm curious to know how it is that he wasn't killed in return fire.) "The latest shooting came just weeks after an Afghan army soldier, who was being trained by French troops, gunned down two members of the Foreign Legion. French forces fired back and killed him."

Part 2.
Part 3.

It has never been my thing to be judgmental, so I have to wonder if I am getting crochety in my advancing age.