Today? More often than not, it’s because the military is a steady paycheck and they will pay for college. It has become for many working class Americans a way out of poverty, one of the few ways out of poverty, in fact.
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https://twitter.com/acorollaries/status/1302489169189625858?s=21
https://twitter.com/acorollaries/status/1302490805387636736?s=21
https://twitter.com/commie_bottom/status/1302494735739822082?s=21
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It’s also a huge bump on a resumé. I have had bosses that would immediately shift all the ex-military applications to the top of the pile, the assumption being they were more responsible, organized, and would follow their orders well. Some were those things, but no greater percentage than any other background, that I could see.
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From the James Nicoll review I linked upthread:
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Such respect!
Sep 5, 2019
President Donald Trump, despite his empty claims that he’s the most pro-military president “ever,” is preparing to drain funds from schools and day care centers that serve military families, as well as stalling readiness projects, to pay for his promised border wall.
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So he misinterpreted the “defund” part.
It’s about not spending on war so the money is there for important things.
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Hogwash. You can’t homogenize something by having it consist of a very diverse group, and veterans come from ALL races, religions, and cultures in the country.
Effective government requires people who give a shit about something other than taking bribes from lobbyists. Military service teaches people how to work as a team.
We can’t possibly have a democratically elected system that is weaker and more rotten and more useless than our current conglomerate of soulless, cowardly, self-serving corporate whores.
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Others have pointed out many of the various reasons that your proposal is awful, so I’ll just focus on your “diversity” argument. Currently less than 10% of U.S. veterans are female. That’s expected to climb a bit in coming decades, but is unlikely to reach anywhere near 50% anytime soon. If you wanted a way to effectively overturn the 19th amendment and revoke the rights of women to vote you could hardly do better.
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UNFORTUNATELY, Trump’s means of dodging the draft was more or less above board. He obtained medical deferments, which was provided for in law. The fact he got so many for the same thing lends credence to the idea he obtained them by foul means - most likely his father bribed a doctor - but unless someone can prove that, his cowardly draft dodging has to be considered legal.
I’m glad to see that you at least agree with the core of my argument. It is obscene beyond belief that a draft dodger should be allowed to hold an office where the lives of American service members hang on his whims. Whether of not you share my idea for a Constitutional amendment, something has to be done to prevent this kind of ugly farce from happening again.
You just brought up something that has bugged me for many years. The anti-war crowd seems to have won their struggle in the arena of public opinion, but part of their platform is the creed that draft dodgers were actually good and moral and holy. And in fact nothing could be farther from the truth. No matter how they try to rationalize their actions, the ugly bottom line is, they killed other Americans for their own benefit.
People try to forget how the draft system worked. They had quotas - every month there were supposed to be a certain number of men inducted into the service. And every time some draft dodger faked a mental illness or ran to Canada, that number came up short. So they increased the size of the next draft to bring in enough men to make up for that shortfall. Every time someone illegally dodged the draft, he forced some other poor fool into the system to take his place. Because Trump dodged the draft, some other guy wound up getting mortared at Pleiku or Da Nang who otherwise might not have been there.
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Some of them are, actually. Some of them make principled stands against war as a moral evil, which is absolutely is, even in the most righteous of cases. War is always destructive and disruptive to human life. Always. Even if it’s the correct action to take. Figuring out alternatives to our political problems should be one of the highest priorities of human kind. We’re failing ourselves and our fellow man by not doing so.
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And most actual people fell somewhere in the middle. By the time I reached draft age, I was already away at college (I graduated high school a year ahead of my age.) I put in for the student deferment pretty much automatically. Before it was time to renew the deferment, Nixon had resigned, Saigon had fallen, and the services were demobilizing; eventually I graduated and was formally 1-A, but they weren’t calling anyone. But still, some of my hyper-conservative, hyper-militaristic relatives consider me a draft dodger because I used a deferment once, lawfully. And some of my far-left friends consider me a hypocrite because the education opportunity that was available to me, and got me a deferment, wouldn’t have been available to someone on a less-privileged social stratum.
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I quite agree that what Heinlein said about it is not what he wrote. Certainly, I remember the scene with the doctor being a civilian contractor. As I commented above, his vision was sort of in between. Services such as fire fighting, police work, and other emergency responses were, in the book, visibly militarized, so ‘veteran firefighter’ could actually not be a metaphor. But clearly something like the CCC would not have been, whatever he said or wrote later.
As far as the service requirement antedating the Bugs, indeed that’s stated. The implication is that it arose because of an earlier failure to unite in the face of a common enemy. Indeed, there was an implication that a generation of society’s future leaders had been lost as unreturned POW’s in a war with China (or with the Communist world in general). That part was expressly political, and I believe Heinlein’s explanation that he included it in protest against the US ratification of the Test Ban Treaty.
You could say the same of teachers. Yet if someone proposed a new law saying “only former teachers can run for President” people would rightly demand to know why we would limit the pool of potential candidates to one specific subset of society.
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As an alternative approach, pass an amendment that anyone, president or congressperson, who authorizes military action shall be entered in a lottery to choose who serves in the front line.
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There’s been so much warranted complaints about who can’t be president that we overlook that some basic requirements may make sense. If you’re Black or a woman, that shoukdn’t keep you out. Being able to read and write must not be a filter to keep people from voting, but seems a good requirement for being president.
Maybe at lower levels such requirements would get in the way of change. And maybe most of the time the earlier steps weed out the incompetent. Like going to the moon, anyone can potentially be president, but ery few ever get to that point.
But it seems like an incredibly bad decision that the Republicans chose Trump as their candidate.
The voters are supposed to be the filter that keeps illiterate fascists out of office.
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But also how to give and take bribes, so I’m not sure that supports your word-salad of a point.
And that’s just recent highlights from the first page of results. Feel free to find dozens more at your leisure.
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What is being done is quite simple, everyone can do it!
It’s called Time.
This is probably the last huzzah of the generation who actually had the opportunity to dodge the draft.
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