A rather angry rant. I apologize in advance.

So, I'm watching Hockey Night in Canada, and Don Cherry does his usual roll of those who have died in Afghanistan, which is about as heart-wrenching as it sounds.  Only, this time, in lieu of it being Remembrance Week, they show the face of every single Canadian that has died in Afghanistan. 

Yeah, that was harsh.  And as I'm watching it, I realized that every time they showed a woman, I made this face... a sort of surprise to see a woman in the roll, since they're not supposed to be front-line fighters.  Ha ha, right? (/sarcasm)

Flash forward to a few minutes ago.  Still watching hockey.  A Remembrance Week commercial rolls, and it ends the way these commercials always end - with a woman in uniform saluting.  And it starts the same way it always starts - with an ethnic canadian in uniform.

Remember that the first image and the last image are the "prime real estate" for any commercial.  By that example, we could conclude that there is a large percentage of ethnic minorities and women in the armed forces.

Of course, that's just not true.  And it makes me angry.

Not that the commercial acknowledges that women and ethnic minorities play a valuable part in our armed forces - they do, and I wholly approve their presence in these ads- but that an effort is made to up their presence for political reasons.

A few years back, I went to "navy days", a public event thrown by the navy to showcase their men and equipment.  Of course, the whole place was patrolled by armed guards, talking to the public and showing off their assault rifles.  And guess what?  More than half of these armed guards were female.

I was with my dad.  "Hey, dad... there sure are a lot of women in uniform.  I didn't realize they were that popular..."

"They're not.  Almost every low-rank woman was selected to work at this event, so that we'll look like we're more equal opportunity."

Apparently, the Armed Forces are all about equal gender opportunities, except when it comes to who gets to die and who gets to live.  Sorry if that sounds harsh.  But if you truly were an equal opportunity employer, you wouldn't force your minority members in the spotlight any time a camera rolled around.  The law of averages says that the first or last image in any of those commercials should usually be a white male.  Anything else is just political bullshit, and I think we can all agree that the big problem with Afghanistan right now is an overabundance of political bullshit.