MBTA hero memorial train rides the rails, yet there is no victim memorial train.

In Boston we now have the hero train riding through our suburbs. The hero train is a mobile memorial, honoring our fallen fighting men and women who have participated in our recent wars in Asia, where we Americans have killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, for no good reason. No one can coherently explain why we’re still in Afghanistan.

I would be willing to support the hero train if we also had a train that memorialized the hundreds of thousands of victims of our heroes.

None of our warriors who died in these wars were heroes. There’s nothing heroic about participating in a fabricated war of aggression. I suspect that most of our warriors were not enthusiastic supporters of this war, that they fought because they were ordered to, and were really victims themselves.

I don’t know who is paying for the hero train, but it might be the people riding the commuter rail. The hero train is however public property.

There is a time and place for everything, and if people want to honor the dead, they can do so privately in a private place. Even if one believes that these people are heroes, I really don’t think that slapping their name on a yellow star on a hero train really honors their memory. I find this whole concept to be tacky and undignified. It is as if we didn’t care enough to erect a real memorial, so we just painted a memorial on a train and then patted ourselves on the back for our patriotism.