8:40pm
I’m from the end-times for real hippies. I’m not saying I am
one, but that was when I formed my connections to a culture I considered mine,
to the hippies of the mid- and late-sixties, into the very early seventies. The
Viet Nam War years. The nightly, dinner-time war-on-TV years, with gunfire and
gore, in color and black-and-white. Toss your guts by watching guts get tossed.
My number came up in the top ten in what turned out to be
the last drawing of The Draft. That’s how it always sounded in my mind: The
Draft. Capitalized. An event of doom. I was definitely against the draft,
especially after the war had been going on so long, and killed so many, both
theirs and ours. Deferments almost didn’t exist by that time, for college, or
marriage or for having kids. They needed meat for the front lines. I didn’t
want to be meat. So I was against The Draft as well as The War.
I’m not so sure about that position any more.
Since the all-volunteer Army, and its siblings in the other
services, was rolled out as the substitute, the various services seems to have
gotten lonelier, less connected to America. They’ve also become more
right-wing. Not just conservative. Almost anyone who’d volunteer to take orders
is by definition a conservative, an authoritarian. Not all, but most.
But to volunteer to be shot at, to be sent into harm’s way
repeatedly, especially into a set of wars that have been going on for almost 18
years now, takes a certain foolishness or desperation. The explanation of
patriotism seems to be one of a person looking for a purpose, whether to
belong, or to follow in the expected footsteps of the family or community
around him.
But the segregation this brings, so that soldiers are found
in clusters, both physically and financially, rather than spread throughout the
fabric or the US, as they were during and after WWII, Korea, and the Viet Nam
wars, has been a social experiment worth re-examining.
Only a particular class, a type of mindset, is volunteering
to be shot at. And this affects not only the make-up and attitude of our
military. The military is the feeder, the source, of many if not the large
majority of our police forces across the nation.
And the desperation of the military to get volunteers, as it
has lowered the bar to entrance and acceptance, has also lowered the bar of
those acceptable to police forces across the country.
Unfortunately, this has hyper-focused an overly conservative,
sometimes outright gang-level racist culture within our military, and distilled
it into many of our police forces.
At least a draft got liberals and conservatives, both the
wide-eyed and not-so innocent, rich-ish and poor alike, and stuck them in with
one another, for a common goal: Get the job done, and don’t get killed, by
trusting the folks around you, not for where they came from, physically or
financially, but for what they could do in the theater of war.
Maybe we need to bring back The Draft.
Anonymized induction.
No addresses, except for the initial letter, or email.
‘Greetings, No. 453627, Your Uncle Sam needs you,’ it would
start.
Some argue for a more generalized, compulsory Public
Service. You might be assigned to build houses for teachers, or hang coaxial cable
into First Nation reservations, or distribute food to the WV miners who couldn’t
feed themselves off the coal that no one used anymore, because so much of the
compulsory service was installing solar on every roof in America.
And while I’m actually all for that, the issue is, who’d
volunteer to get shot at when they could stay relatively safe, building
Habitats for Humanity or putting up solar? How do you keep a good
socio-economic mix in the military? Because the home police forces aren’t going
to recruit from solar installers or well-drillers. They’ll look for prior
experience under fire, prior life in an authoritarian hierarchy, and the
military-to-police pipeline selects for exactly that.
9:10pm
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