Red

So Yezida reports that she has seen this email making the rounds.

The Americans who support our troops, are the silent majority. We are not "organized" to reflect who we are, or to reflect what our opinions are.

We would like to start a grassroots movement using the membership of the Special Operations Association, and Special Forces Associations, and all their friends, simply, to recognize that Americans support our troops. We need to inform the local VFW's and American Legion, our local press, local TV, and continue carrying the message to the national levels as we start to get this going. Our idea of showing our solidarity and support for our troops is --- starting Friday, and continuing on each and every Friday, until this is over, that every red-blooded American who supports our young men and women, WEAR SOMETHING RED.

Word of mouth, press, TV --- let's see if we can make the United States, on any given Friday, a sea of red much like a home football game at a University.

What's astonishing about this is that it's a mutation of a antiwar meme that didn't quite catch on last year --- I plugged it here on my blog --- saying to do the exact same thing. Interestingly, the oppositionalist history of the symbol has been lost in the translation. The antiwar version of the email, which ran last year, opened with this:

When Norway was occupied by Germany in 1940, Norwegian women began to knit red caps for children as a way of letting everyone know that they did not like what was happening in their country. The result was that whenever Norwegians left their homes: to go to the store, to work, etc, they could see that the majority opposed what was going on in their country.

Perhaps this reflects a recognition on the part of the authors of the later email that supporting our troops and opposing the war are compatible ideas. That must be what they had in mind.