But I have to say this article has a interesting look at the composition of our armed forces. While I don't completely agree with the premise (Hunter Biden, the son of the former veep, served in the Navy Reserve), it's worth a read.
America’s Elite Needs to Get Back in Uniform
Military service is a unifying force in a time of deep division.
Odds are that any American reading this article doesn’t have family serving in the military. That’s the case for most Americans, perhaps especially the folks who read Foreign Policy magazine. In the United States, privately educated and upper-income people are strikingly unlikely to serve or to encourage their children to do so—only 3 percent of military recruits attended private high schools—even more so if they’re from the northern or coastal states, which are the most underrepresented areas for recruiting. U.S. military service can seem foreign or frightening. That’s a mistake—and it’s bad for the country.
Military service made no sense to me, once. As a Jewish psychiatrist’s daughter attending Bryn Mawr College and Princeton University, the military was deeply foreign to me.. Then I married into it and converted to the idea of military life...
Respectfully, she is off there. I spent 23 years in the Army and the Army Reserve, I am a daily reader of Foreign Policy. I generally find the officer corp is very well read, especially the more senior officers.
...In the military, and in a military family, you learn to do something very hard and not of your own choosing, for a cause bigger than yourself. You’re working for a cause determined by the mechanisms of democracy, standing side by side with others who are fully committed. Current U.S. civilian life has a striking absence of “common causes”—tasks that remind us that there is more that unites us than divide us.
What makes every serviceperson valuable is not their wealth, SAT score, or political opinions, but that they have sworn to support and defend, as well as bear true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, no matter the personal cost.
Almost all the people who serve report feeling proud of the work they do—96 percent in the polls from Blue Star Families, the military family organization I lead, —and report that their experience has made them better. Military service affords the opportunity to live in a relatively egalitarian society —the highest-paid general makes 11 times what the lowest-paid private makes.
Military families get subsidized health care, housing, and child care. The military is integrated; it was the first place in the United States where blacks routinely commanded whites and it built the first integrated Southern schools in the late 1940s. The safest place in the United States for an African-American teen outside the home alone at night is probably on a military base.
But perhaps most relevant in a fiercely divisive political climate is that in the military, you learn to be an American.
The Founding Fathers conceived of the U.S. military as a crucial part of a self-governing democracy; a citizen military, not an army of mercenaries or a warrior caste. They devoted more clauses of the U.S. Constitution to the construction of the military than to any other task—17 in total—and embedded responsibility for it in the executive, the legislative, and the states to bind the military to the constitutional democratic process.
But the founders also saw military experience as an essential part of informed civilian governance—a tradition that lasted for nearly two centuries. True, the founders imagined a state-based military—hence the Second Amendment—but they would likely have approved of the first populist incarnation of our modern standing army.
In the 1950s, the majority of the graduating classes from Princeton, Harvard, and Yale went on to serve in the military. In the 1970s, nearly three-quarters of members of Congress were veterans.
Now, just 1 percent of Americans are currently serving, and since the abolition of conscription in 1973, that comes disproportionately from areas and from families with a history of service. Far fewer than 1 percent of top college graduates—those who go on to newsrooms, C-suites, and government committees—have or will serve in the military...
...Kathy Roth-Douquet is CEO of Blue Star Families, a national
military family organization, and co-author, with Frank Schaeffer, of AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service - And How It Hurts Our Country...
Again, the entire article is worth the read, but I have issues with the basis premise, for two reasons. One I've already posted above and in the American Thinker article. The other is a bit of bias, but so be it. The closer you get to America's elite universities, the more regressive (i.e. leftist) is the faculty, staff, and classes. In other words, the university students are indoctrinated in a way of thinking that is opposed to the United States as it was founded. Putting in radicals into the officer corps will only weaken the service, which only has one purpose, "to win our wars." Until the echelons of higher learning have more diversity of thought, as opposed to skin color, sex, or religion, this is a non-starter. Think I'm a bit crazed in my way of thinking? Well, could there be a more conservative institution than the United States Military Academy at West Point NY? They would never put a crazed leftist into the service, right? Right:
U.S. Army and West Point both respond about ‘official socialist organizer’ and Army officer Spenser Rapone who is espousing Communism
Spenser Rapone went viral after being discovered as a socialist organizer espousing Communism
Spenser Rapone, a West Point graduate and current U.S. Army officer is under fire after being discovered to be a vehement Communist propagandist and ‘official socialist organizer” of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Rapone’s social media is filled with up to hundreds of posts, messages and photos which are now being circulated around the military and civilian communities.
U.S. Army spokesperson Valerie Mongello told American Military News:
“Both the Department of Defense and the Army have long-standing policies encouraging Soldiers to participate in the democratic process. Among other activities, Soldiers are encouraged to vote in elections and express their personal opinions on public issues. However, the Army has strict rules regarding the wear and appearance of Army uniforms.”
“All allegations of improper behavior by Soldiers are forwarded to the Soldier’s commander for review and final disposition. The appropriate Command authorities are reviewing the situation.”
Rapone has posted many images and messages on social media that show his vehement support for communism and socialism.
Rapone is a 2LT (Second Lieutenant) and an infantry officer in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, NY.
He has posted pictures showing his Democratic Socialists of America membership card next to his military uniform along with many other posts...
While some may suggest different viewpoints are good for a diversity of thought, this is not divergent "viewpoints." Questioning the wisdom of the planned invasion of Iraq as we are deploying to Afghanistan, that is a divergent viewpoint. This is a rejection of the service, the nation it serves, and the Constitution which founded our way of government. This disgrace to the Long Gray Line took an oath, in part, to "...solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion... Thankfully he's no longer in the service, good riddance to bad garbage.
The long march continues. And we don't need that in the service.
UPDATE:
An example of why we don’t need the influence of the “smart” people in the service:
‘Castrate their corpses,’ professor says of GOP senators. White ‘genocide!’ Tucker Carlson cries.
Saturday — two days before white 'genocide’
C. Christine Fair would later call the tweet an “experiment.” Not a performance, exactly. Not a trap, really. Certainly not a genocidal death threat, whatever it looked like at first glance.
“Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men,” the Georgetown University associate professor wrote Saturday afternoon, meaning the Republican senators who were defending Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh from sexual assault allegations. “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps,” she wrote. “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
An experiment, she insisted. A little bait tossed into the wilds of the Internet, to see what species of hate it would attract.
No comments:
Post a Comment