Soldiers. With guns. In our cities.

This is a Liberal attack ad from the 2004 election. (Note: Just ignore the link at the beginning. I have no idea who it is and haven't even visited it, it's just the only copy I could find on youtube.)



This is a brief overview of the fallout. You can find a bunch more by googling "soldiers with guns in our cities".

Here's something that happened in August 2005.

Slinger writes about wanting reassurance that he can walk around through life normally without being tased. I want the same reassurance that I can walk around through life normally without being beaten up by soldiers.

I know the main focus in this story should really be the homeless guy who was killed, but I'm finding myself far more interested in Valerie Valen. As socially unacceptable as it is to say, I've never felt particularly safe around soldiers, and I feel even less safe the more I learn about military training. People often try to reassure me about this, pointing out that I'm a civilian so I'm the kind of person soldiers are trained to protect. And if it's a sort of quiet, private conversation that isn't going to be repeated with someone to whom I'm close enough that we can get politically incorrect, my interlocutor might point out that I'm also female and white and clearly Canadian-born and don't look like I could possibly present any sort of threat to anyone. I'm basically as close as you can get without being a child or a puppy to being the poster child for everything military brainwashing training has them protecting on the home front.

But so is Valerie Valen. Ms. Valen has every quality that anyone has ever completed the sentence "You don't need to be afraid of soldiers because you're ________" with.

So all I can conclude is that soldiers will beat me up if I ever try to be a good citizen in a way that is inconvenient to them.

Dear Canadian Forces: Do you want me to feel safe about your soldiers being in my city? What are you going to do about it?