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Name: Kristia Cavere
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Reflections on Memorial Day & My Brother, a Fallen Soldier

Posted by Kristia Cavere on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 12:00:00 AM
 

There are some of us lucky enough to know very early what we are supposed to be.  My brother, Sergeant Jonathan Cadavero, was one of those fortunate people.  He never had dilemmas about the path he was supposed to take.  Jon always knew he wanted to be a soldier.  A picture of him on his first birthday shows little Jonny giving a salute, albeit with his palm facing out, an infantile indication of his future profession. 

There are some who are born with a warrior spirit.  I thank God for these men every day.  They have protected and defended our families, values, and freedom that have kept America strong and great for 233 years. 

Those with warrior souls find kindred spirits in our armed services.  They embark upon duty and honor mixed with adventure and daring, free from the feminization of the civilian world.  The biological male urge of protecting women and children is positively realized by their protecting our country from her enemies. 

It was into this Army world that Jon ventured after graduating college with honors.  His choices were many, his chosen path was one.  Jon believed he was destined to be a soldier.  He joined the 10th Mountain Division because of its frequent deployment.  He then decided to leave officer candidate school and remain on the enlisted side to be closer to the men. 

In an ironic twist of happenstance, Jon decided his specialty would be that of a combat medic.  The sight of needles always made him queasy, until he began medic school.  His wariness of medical instruments and procedures was replaced with a dedication to help every wounded soldier on the front lines.  Medics are the number one target of our enemies.  But medics are also the heroes of our heroes. 

The simplest way to describe Jon’s personality is that of a true Christian in the sense of treating others as one would want to be treated.  His favorite Bible verse is a little known one, Proverbs 3:27:  “Whenever you possibly can, do good to those that need it.”  That is exactly how Jon lived his life.

His favorite quote from a book was from Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle, a novel about a soldier’s career from World War II through Vietnam.  The protagonist, when trying to define honor for his young son, states, “You can’t help what you were born and you may not have much to say about where you die, but you can and you should try to pass the days in between as a good man.”  Jon appreciated the simplicity of the description of honor and underlined the statement and wrote it on the first blank page of the book. 

Jon had no choice in the circumstances of his passing, on a convoy patrolling for I.E.D.s outside of Baghdad.  But he chose to live his life as a good man, an honorable soldier, and a brave medic. 

Like many of our soldiers, Jon believed that it was during war time when his country most needed him.  He joined a front-line unit as their medic because he stated that being on the front lines was where he was most needed.  And in our last conversation Jon told me that he was considering re-enlisting because he wanted to continue the positive contributions his unit was making. 

After being in Iraq for three months, Jon came home on leave.  I asked him a rather silly question, if he was ever afraid.  Jon admitted that he was always afraid, but said that the true character of a man is how he behaves while he is afraid. 

There are no words adequate enough to describe the devastation upon hearing of your soldiers’ death.  The frenzied blend of emotions is incomprehensible.  Jon’s whole family was so proud of him.  We were honored that he would choose to protect us and this nation.  But there was unbearable grief at the thought of never seeing him again, at least on earth.

Since my brother’s passing, the meaning of Memorial Day changed for me.  The holiday was always solemnly celebrated in our small hometown with a parade and remembrance ceremony.  Memorial Day symbolizes the start of summer when everything is blooming and alive.  It is reflected by the hope we have as individuals, a community, and a nation.  But it is also a recognition that we have this hope and optimism because of the service and sacrifice of our military heroes.  Especially on Memorial Day, our most solemn of American holidays, our soldiers, veterans and fallen heroes are remembered for sustaining freedom in our country and world.  Where we would be without these guardians of freedom is a thought to terrible to imagine.

Perhaps in heaven, although filled with all good people, there are those with truly kindred spirits who find each other.  Our fallen heroes will never get the opportunity to have their grandchildren around them as they tell their tales from their military days.  But perhaps our fallen warriors come together sometimes to swap stories.  Although among the angels now, these brave souls continue to inspire patriots.  And, I like to think, they are watching over America and those of us still left below. 

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The Androgyny Effect

Posted by Kristia Cavere on Friday, May 01, 2009 12:00:00 AM
Everywhere one turns there are examples of a forced equality where all unique distinctions and achievements of individuals are discarded. The recent bailouts, both of citizens and companies, is one case of the lack of differentiation between those individuals who were responsible and those who were self-serving, as the latter were rewarded and artificially elevated to a similar status of the former.

Not content that in America today there are equal opportunities for all, groups that declare they are disadvantaged are demanding equal outcomes. This misplaced emphasis on a superficial comparison of results clouds the correlation of contribution to consequences. Rather than looking at successful outcomes and tracing through the efforts that produced this, self-interested groups choose to focus on a demographic difference to cry discrimination.

Forced equality to make everyone equal in all ways is mutating us into an androgynous country where no one is distinguishable. This androgyny is the result of feminism, which sought to remove distinctions between males and females to create a gender-neutral culture, and then other groups emulated this pattern to move us toward an artificial egalitarian society.

The first feminists advocated for equal voting rights, and when this was achieved they sought equal education and economic prospects. But once women entered the workforce in large numbers their emphasis shifted from equal access to an outcome-based standard of salaries as a measurement of equality. The feminists equated differing dollar amounts with discrimination. The presence of men already in the workforce, and the subsequent seniority and skill they had achieved over time, was dismissed in favor of a salary-based comparison to validate effort rather than result. This started to destroy merit-based systems and compensation based upon individual achievement.

Personal accomplishment then began to be discouraged in the very place where the perception of males and females being androgynous began: our public schools. Feminists shrieked that the lower participation of girls in math and science was a sign of discrimination rather than a sign of disinterest. They encouraged the teachers unions to change the curriculum to boost the number of girls taking hard sciences, ignoring how these feminizing changes began to disenfranchise young men.

The motivation or natural interest that produced a higher participation of males in math and science became the impetus for the feminists to start altering fundamental systems such as education to ensure, even to the disregard of its impact upon males, an increase in the number of females in each academic area. This became the model for increasing the number of girls who compete in school sporting events. Rather than creating more opportunities for females who desired to be on an athletic team, feminists decreased the number of boys playing sports so the number of athletes would be equal for both sexes.

A quota system, while destructive in schools and places of work, has potentially catastrophic consequences for our national security when it is applied to our armed services. Even the last bastion of masculinity, our military, was not immune to the feminist assault upon unique identities.

The feminists have practically achieved their goal of a gender-neutral military. In 1992 a Presidential Commission on women in the military discovered that only 1 out of 100 female soldiers were capable of achieving the same physical fitness standards as 60 out of 100 male soldiers could. But because test scores were “gender-normed,” with the grade of “A” for a woman being the equivalent to a “D” for a man, females were prevented from failing. The same Commission heard evidence from top military officials that between 40 and 50 percent of enlisted women were not physically capable of performing their specific occupations. But servicewomen were promoted and advanced alongside the men regardless of their physical ability to do their job.

Feminists have gone beyond manipulating physical fitness scores to ignoring the misdeeds of women soldiers that should warrant some disciplinary action. Beginning in the Persian Gulf War, servicewomen who got pregnant in the war zone and were sent home were still awarded a badge for combat service, and allowed to have equal recognition with their brothers and sisters-in-arms who remained in combat during the duration of their deployment. This diminished the perseverance of soldiers who remained at war, and endangered the mission due to manpower shortages.

Once the mandatory equality of men and women were instilled in our armed services, the next step became an androgyny for all soldiers. Beginning in 2001 black berets, traditionally worn only by Army Rangers, one of the army’s most elite all-male units tasked with doing impossible missions with near-impossible odds, were issued to all soldiers as an attempt to make everyone feel equally important. The years of gallant effort it took to wear a black beret was something to aspire to, and distributing them to everyone in the Army reduced the value of the Ranger unit who deserve to be distinguished.

Gender-norming is not as apparent in professions where physical capabilities don’t underlie measures of performance and contribute to readiness. But in the military, and those in the public safety such as fire and police officers, the measure of physical capabilities of women which are being manipulated to ensure androgyny demonstrate how far radical feminists are willing to go to prove there exists no distinctions between men and women.

For the past fifty years, feminists never remained satisfied with equality but continue to demand special rights and a glorification of everything feminine with a suppression of men and masculinity. The classical feminism of the suffragettes is not recognizable in its modern form of forced androgyny through gender-norming.

Where emotion makes logic leaps, the product is rarely rational. The aggressive feminization of our schools, workplaces, and military has fractured our society into diverse entities all competing for special rights rather than the betterment of our country. The distinctions which make us valued as unique individuals are disappearing, and the result is a society that is less productive, less cohesive, and less capable of advancing.
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