• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 22, 2009

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It’s gotten to the point that I’m afraid to open office e-mail announcements for fear of learning that another colleague or colleague’s spouse has died.

We’re a company of relatively little turnover. Companies once kept turnover down by paying and treating their employees well. Now, people are reluctant to leave a job for fear they may never work again.

As a consequence, the average age of our work force has gone up and with it the statistically expectable deaths to heart attack and cancer.

We’re more likely, now, to tell the people we work with how much we appreciate what they do. We tell our spouses and children that we love them as we leave the house.

In this season of giving thanks, we give thanks but with qualifications. We are thankful for having jobs but wonder how long before the next economic lurch throws more workers out of the gondola.

I am thankful for the men and women willing to risk their lives overseas but can’t stand hearing politicians, many of whom were not in the military and whose children weren’t in the military, say our soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen in the Middle East keep us free.

In all of America’s wars, including the Civil War, Americans have died to keep or make other people free. Our wars in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East did not give us freedom of speech or freedom of anything else. We already had those freedoms.

If anything, the wars in the Middle East have deprived us of personal freedoms. Remember when you didn’t have to take your shoes off at the airport?

I hate terrorism, but I reserve some anger for our not putting air marshals on all passenger planes and running secure airports BEFORE 9/11.

When terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers, we had to retaliate. We did by carpet bombing Afghanistan. We made our point. When we put troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, we repeated the mistakes of Great Britain and Russia. We used France’s blueprint for failure in Vietnam as our own map to disaster. We don’t learn.

I cannot be thankful for young men and women serving in Iraq. They shouldn’t be there. I will be thankful when they’re home.

We are only holding our own in a war against people who make bombs in their kitchens and basements. Our soldiers are losing their lives or limbs to homemade explosives.

We are hemorrhaging money and getting transfusions from China.