‘[Trump] doesn’t actually care about us. What he cares about is using us.’ — Marine vet Alexander McCoy is sick of veterans being used as political props.
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‘I can’t stand to be used as a political prop and most veterans feel the same way. Donald Trump doesn’t actually have our backs.
He doesn’t actually care about us. What he cares about is using us to use us as a shield from criticism. To use us to hide how un-American his ideas are, to use us to divide Americans against each other, and to support ideas that would purge our society of the very things that can bring us together.’
Alexander McCoy is an organizer with Common Defense, a grassroots organization of veterans fighting for progressive values
“I served six years in the Marine Corps. And when I got out in 2013, I wanted to find a new purpose. In the military, you get a sense of, you know, making a difference and being part of something bigger than yourself. And I just didn’t find that once I got out until I started fighting to make my community better. And that’s why I got involved as an organizer working together with fellow veterans who are so often used by politicians on both parties as political props and tokens. And that’s something that frustrates me deeply. That’s something that we need to change. And the only way we can change that is by veterans like me coming together and speaking out for ourselves.
We stand up for progressive values of standing up for working people not corporations not PACs not the rich. We stand up for equality, LGBT rights, women’s rights, the #MeToo movement ending sexual assault. We stand up against racial discrimination and bigotry and we fight for an America that aligns with what we wanted, what we believe in when we served. So we do that by coming together in our communities by speaking out by organizing ourselves because so much of the political establishment has abandoned talking to real people.
When I knock on a door and the person I’m talking to maybe identifies as a conservative or a Republican or even an Independent when I tell them that I was a Marine Corps veteran often they’ll give me a second look. They’ll actually listen to what I have to say and it’s a way of breaking down some of the barriers that have emerged in our country. […] Often what you see is candidates and organizations saying we’re so divided, right? We’re so tribalist, we don’t talk to each other. But those same organizations are not addressing the reasons for that. They just want us to stop complaining. They want us to stop standing up for the things we believe in and they want to go back to a failed system where corporations and the rich are controlling all our lives and rigging our economy against us. I believe in something different. Because I’m a Marine Corps veteran, nobody can question the fact that I believe in my community and that I’m willing to put others first. And so you’ll hear when I talk to somebody they’ll give me a second look. Even if we don’t share the same party even if we don’t share the same way of self identifying what I’ve found is that most people in this country share a lot of the same values. We want the same things. We want reliable healthcare. We want wages to keep up. We want to be able to make ends meet. We want to protect our families and we want to be safe and I can relate to that, but too many politicians try to use fear and bigotry to divide us so that we’re distracted and so that we turn against each other so that they can keep rigging the rules against us.’
#Veterans #Vets #Marine #Trump #Politics
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