On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
> And what about the old GI coffeehouses from the Vietnam days? Was there
> just more discontent to work with within the military then? Are they all
> just good soldiers now.
There's lots of discontent, but the difference between a draft and a volunteer army seems to make a huge difference. The idea that "they signed a contract" seemed to play an extraordinary role in the contemporary soldiers' thinking -- and obviously played no role at all among drafted soldiers, many of whom felt that they were entirely and unjustly coerced.
And secondly of course there's the selection process. When you have a draft, some people who hate the military and the government end up in the military simply because they don't want to go to jail. So you get a bunch of guys who start out already in boot camp seething in opposition and equipped with an alternative worldview and who work up from there.
Combine those two things, and you end up with an almost ready-made activist corps to set up things like coffee houses.
Michael