At a festival called Peacestock in Wisconsin last weekend, I met a woman who lives in Little Falls, Minnesota. That city had forced her to take down signs in her own yard, signs that said "Occupy Wall Street," "Back the 99 Percent" and "Boycott Monsanto."
But Robin Hensel noticed that the city itself was displaying, in violation of the same ordinance, a banner reading "We Support Our Troops."
These kinds of incidents -- and I've been through them too, and can testify to the viciousness the threats can take on -- expose the darker meaning behind "support our troops." That meaning is "death to the other side." Needless to say, the work of troops is killing. Those on the other side in a war are supposed to die. The official bragging about how many have died, so common during the Vietnam War, has not been entirely absent from the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Hensel placed herself in the enemy camp, in the minds of some war proponents. And therefore she needed to die. The threats flooded in.
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