My son is threatening to join the military. I hear those mothers and wives singing “Johnny has gone for a soldier,” but their men had no choice. Can he truly go off to war simply because he needs more structure in his life? Surely there are alternate ways to find structure.
My heart is broken, because they will deploy him to Afghanistan to take part in a war that has been going on forever and that depends upon issues buried in the sand itself, old as life itself, but that have nothing to do with us. Obama told us that we have specific goals there; maybe his, but they are not mine. John Dickerson pontificated the nonsense that we, the people, should not be involved in deciding which wars we will fight because we are not the best informed. We are precisely the ones who should decide whether we send our boys to war. If we decided, if Congress could not simply back the President’s request for troops without our consent. And that would be a good thing.
The burden of war is not distributed equally, and that is wrong, but it is not. And therefore I have spent my life insuring that my children would never be part of the classes that are forced to join the military to get an education, to acquire a bit of prestige, to land a steady job. We are not they! My dad was, but I went to university to avoid living in that world. And now we are falling back into that class, in the space of one generation.
Beyond the pain of seeing him ready to slip us back into the working class, there is the ideological problem. The military is an alien culture. In exchange for a small income, you agree to die or become maimed if asked. Once inside the framework, you have to believe that war is a glorious business. You have to see U.S. interventions as necessary, whatever their motivation. I understand the need for a defensive military – the one down here, for example. But ours runs around invading at will. How does one accept that?
I know that he craves a framework – I too have been terrified of empty space. But had my parents handed me the opportunities we have handed him, I would have flown. If you need order, why not master Latin and Greek, I ask him. I’m afraid that the horrible truth is that he is comfortable in a blokish, non-self-reflective environment. And therefore he will do whatever they want him to do.
He needs a shape that I was not able to provide, I thinking that freedom to choose one’s own life mattered above all. But he is failing. I was so sure that exposing him to the joy of study would turn him into a scholar, but he doesn’t have it in him, at least not now.
In the meantime he is off to university for a year in Canada, study abroad. Let him come back happy, disciplined, poised for success. Or maybe he will find a way to stay and not come back. May he find what he needs; let it not be the military.
I am crying. The military and its world view, its arrogant assurance that we need to safeguard the world - without reflection or measure – is responsible for the evils of the earth. It is an organization created by boys who need excitement and authority beyond what ordinary life offers. They would be comical with their silly little salutes and their playing at glory if they weren’t carrying machine guns and dropping bombs. Once inside the house of mirrors, they start to believe that it’s all real. It’s their faulty, the ones who get old and still don’t grow up. They perpetuate this insanity by recruiting hot blooded little guys, getting them while they are still gullible and out of control, before any philosophy has taken hold in their heads, before they have the resources to say no.
They world is filled with enemies and evil because they are in charge, those little big guys, allowed to play with guns, when they should be locked up.
