> Tell me of an organization offering every year tens
> of thousands of
> entry-level jobs with excellent benefits and
> training that young
> people can afford to ignore. Th eUS military is a
> huge employer, woven
> into the fabric of class relations and our society
> as a whole.
> Encouraging young people not to join the military
> and making people
> aware of high-prssure recruiting in high schools are
> worthy means of
> protest and here in Seattle we are leading the way
> on the recruitment
> issue. Once a person is in, the situation is
> different. They are
> fulfilling a sworn obligation to their community.
Look, you do not need to lecture me about the benefits of working for the military. I did work for that organization for 6 or so years as a matter of choice between mostly janitorial jobs available to me as an immigrant, and working as a training specialist for the Army. I was (and still am) a pacifist, yet I decided to accept the Army employment. True, I was sick and tired of walking with the vacuum cleaner, but I had other options (such as applying to a graduate program at Amherst) which at that time appeared less attractive to me. Perhaps I should have taken the Amherst option, but that would have deprived me of experiencing the Army. Besides, at the end I landed at an academic institution anyway.
Working for the Army was a very educational experience in many ways - perhaps the best I had in my entire teaching career. I learned quite a bit about the military folk - many of them were quite intelligent, critically thinking, sceptical of "government propaganda," undertaking a difficult intellectual task of trying to understand how their enemy think (that is perhaps why some of them befriended an Eastern European immigrant of an openly pacifist and left-leaning persuasion) - I would say much more so than an average college undergraduate. Of course some other were bumbling idiots - juts like their civilian counterparts.
What I learned from that experience is not to stereotype or point the finger at those who join the service. I also learned that the Army can be quite progressive in many ways - offering equal opportunity employment regardless of network connections (otherwise I would not be there), promoting ethnic and gender equality or spearheading sexual harassment prevention when it was a standard practice in most civilian institutions.
And yes, they are trained to kill but killing is an integral part of life. All life forms kill to eat or to avoid being eaten - humans are no exceptions. Contrary to the religious bullshit poisoning the political discourse in this country, no life is "sacred," killing by itself is neither good or bad - it becomes bad only when it is illegal, wanton and unnecessary. But it can also be a good thing, eg. when figting the Nazis or imperialists (one will certainly not defeat them by persuasion alone.) So I see no problem with the fact that GIs are trained to kill. In fact they bear no less or more "responsibility" than, say, a factory worker manufacturing their M-16s, or for that matter a civlian training specialist of pacifist and left-leaning persuasion who teaches them how to gather information enabling them to kill more efficiently.
I still wish that more people refused to volunteer for the mercenary service for the US empire - but this is because of the fundamentally fucked up nature of the US leadership that uses military as its policy tool, rather than because of the violent nature of military mission. In fact, I belive that abolition of the efficient and professional armed forces - such as those of the US - would be a bad thing, leading to anarchy and gangsterism.
Wojtek
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