This is a bit of a serious post. If you read it in Australian comedian’s Jim Jefferies voice, then you’ll enjoy it a bit more.
If you spent five minutes on the non-cat video area of the Internet yesterday, then you noticed the American commander-in-chief decided to throw some red meat to his political base. I am talking about President Trump telling transgender soldiers that, “Hey, you’re not wanted.”
Now, there are many enlightened bloggers up in arms because this move is just another example of Trump picking on a minority group. He did it in the primaries. He did it in the general election, and true to form the Bully in the Oval Office isn’t giving up his signature move anytime soon. His fans love it. Nothing makes a bully more popular with their bully-fans than kicking sand in the face of some kid in a wheelchair.
Bullies come in all shapes and sizes. There’s the seventh-grade bully who thinks he’s Louis CK for asking all the guys in class if they’re a homo sapien. There’s the bully who had a crappy dad and now has over a million YouTube subscribers.
Regardless of the flavor of bully one is dealing with, two things should be obvious to any rational person:
- The act of bullying is dumb f*ck stupid;
- Dumb f*ck stupid gets in the way of adults trying to get things done.
You may not like Israel’s policies in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. I understand that. However, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) isn’t lazy. Israel is roughly the size of Orlando’s Disney World’s parking lot. And that parking lot happens to be in a, well, let’s say not the most stable are in the world. They have to be on their toes or else.
One military that has no problem with transgender soldiers: Israel’s is an article from the LA Times. It demonstrates the differences between a military who has to be efficient (Israel’s) to a military where the commander-in-chief likes to play politics with his toys that go BOOM (the US’s).
Elazar Stern is a retired IDF general and was asked what he thought about Trump’s ban on transgender soldiers. I imagine the man scrunched up his face in the universal sign of “This is the biggest stupid I’ve heard all day.”
Speaking with The Times, Stern, now a member of Israel’s parliament for the centrist Yesh Atid party, said that throughout his 34-year career in the army, “in every post, at every level, always, I knew there were homosexual individuals serving with me. No transgendered people that I knew of, but maybe. We would never ask, honestly, and we’re not supposed to know. The army’s task is to support its soldiers no matter what their needs, not meddle about in their lives.”
The article goes on to say that transgender soldiers have been accepted in the IDF since 1998.
Oh, and the Israeli government financially supports citizens transitioning.
You don’t have to like a government’s policies to see what it does well. You can hate Finland all day for its socialist snow and ice but recognize the country but does a good job with education. It’d be stupid for a country not to take a gander and maybe learn a few of their tricks. It’s the same thing with Israel’s inclusive policy with its military.
America’s commander-in-chief isn’t interested in helping America being great now or in the future. A bully only cares about the bully, and sadly their fans love it.
Andrew Hall is the author of Laughing in Disbelief. Besides writing a blog, co-hosting the Naked Diner, he wrote two books, Vampires, Lovers, and Other Strangers and God’s Diary: January 2017
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