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When departing Police Chief Jamie Graham says placing stickers with the logo "support our troops" on city police cars is in no way political, he's suggesting he doesn't know what political is. Or he doesn't care.
Graham is a military buff who loves soldiers and tales of war. He said as much to the Courier when he first took the Vancouver Police Department's helm five years ago, and since that time he's become a Henry V among police chiefs, a loyal battalion commander who successfully shepherded his band of troops through the hell of mild civilian oversight and occasional press scrutiny.
It's no surprise that one of his last acts as chief was to supervise the distribution of the stickers on Vancouver police cars. "This is about the safe return of the men and women serving in Afghanistan," Graham said, according to the Globe and Mail.
Amen to that. But there's far more to it.
I want the safe return of our soldiers as much as anybody. And I have no problems with soldiers, guns or shooting people when it's absolutely necessary, unavoidable or even helpful in preventing a massive evil. I sometimes wish more people historically had been shot before they got up to no good: Hitler in 1933, for example, or the people who created the telephone solicitation industry. And while I'm sceptical about the commitment of the major world players to create real change in Afghanistan, leaving earnest junior partners like Canada holding the bag and taking a disproportionate number of casualties, I agree with gadfly Terry Glavin who infamously wrote in the online Tyee that if freeing and lifting up the poor of Afghanistan from religious dictatorship means shooting a few fascists, so be it.
But a gentle, honest question is required: why single out soldiers for special notice on police cars? Yes, our soldiers are doing important jobs, but so are daycare workers (who care for us when we're tiny), workers in seniors homes (who care for us when we're forgotten), and garbage collectors, who when they're not on strike, defend us from the plague. In terms of world history, and keeping cities safe, their work means more than we realize.
Soldiers don't have a monopoly on work that involves risk, physical danger and courage. In 2005 in B.C. alone, 43 loggers were killed in accidents on the job in what was a black year for the forestry industry. Total Canadian combat deaths for 2006, our bloodiest period in Afghanistan, was 36.
So why no stickers for our loggers, who are also essential to the economy?
It may be because they don't wear uniforms. Graham's stickers represent the romanticization of all things military that's crept through Canada in past years. It first appeared when we started getting sentimental about the dying out of the generation who saw us through the Second World War. The shock of 9/11, and the resulting commitment of Canadian troops to war in Afghanistan, intensified our feelings for anyone in boots.
Now military man-love has become part of the national consciousness. Think of how even peacenik Vancouver has shifted culturally. In the 1980s, city council declared Vancouver a nuclear weapons-free zone, thus frustrating the plans of the federal government of the time to put nuclear missile launchers in Mount Pleasant. (How the East Side roared at that one.) Now we're doing Tony Orlando and Dawn to public emergency vehicles.
Our adoration of the military has been more than used by the Harper government. Criticize anything about the mission in Afghanistan and you're immediately accused of not caring about the fate of the soldiers who are there. That's why the slogan "support our troops" is phrased in the imperative. It's a command, and a highly political one. It's not about supporting troops--it's about supporting the agenda of the government. That it's coming from the cops is a problem, because supporting a specific military mission, or supporting the military at all, is not a legal requirement in this country. And political statements should not be delivered by civil servants with guns.
At least one VPD member has served in Afghanistan with the reserves, and another two are scheduled to head there soon. Individually, our police should have the right to express support for their fellow officers heading overseas. But dressing up taxpayer-supplied cruisers with slogans goes too far.
How many VPD cars will bear the stickers is unknown. According to the Globe, the VPD won't reveal the number for "security reasons."
Security reasons? For stickers? That smells like politics.
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