In a recent article I wrote that I believe the only way to stop the madness and the war-making machine of the United States is to begin mandatory military conscription for all American men and women beginning as soon as possible. After receiving a few hundred responses to that article I have come to the conclusion that I was partially wrong. I am now sure that the military draft must be initiated immediately. If only there were some way to retro-actively conscript Americans, what a better world we might be living in today.
My argument boiled down to: "The only way to change the minds of flag-waving American patriots would be the maiming or death of their own children in Bush’s insane foreign adventures." The vast majority of respondents to this article agreed with me. Several people were dead-set against my ideas. It is these people who disagreed with me who should be some of the first to be put into military slavery. It is these people who seemed to fail to grasp the entire point of the article. The people who disagreed basically fell into two groups.
The first group argued that it took 15 years of military conscription during the Vietnam War to boil over into a powerful anti-war movement. They insisted that 15 years was too long to wait. My standard reply to them was, "Do you have an idea of a quicker way as to how to stop the killing?"
The second group of people were the group that disgusted me the most. I’ll call them the What about me? group. The What about me? people complained that they were anti-war and, as such, they should not be drafted. And it is this group precisely that I wrote about in my article.
What about me?! Yeah? What about you? What about over 100,000 dead Iraqis? What about a half-million malnourished or crippled Iraqi kids? What about them? Where were you when the bombs started dropping? Where were you during the Clinton years when US planes dropped bombs murdering innocent Serbs? Where were you when the Bush II administration started murdering Afghanis? What about me?! Yes! What about you? Where have you been and what have you been doing? Besides watching Friends, I suspect not a whole hell of a lot.
It’s you self-centered Americans that are going to have to have your head on the chopping block before you’ll pick up the remote, turn off the TV, and get up off your ass and do something about the mass murder and other crimes of our unquestionably militaristic nation’s empire building.
So let me ask you in easier to understand terms, how are we going to get a bunch of selfish brats to wake up and clean their room? I think the only way is to make a penalty. There’s going to have to be a penalty if they don’t: Bring back the military draft now.
And even with a military draft, as in Vietnam, it may take the dimwits 15 years to wake-up. They may never wake up. Americans are the most propagandized people on the earth. Oddly enough, it seems that many American youth take pride in being "dumb." The draft may not change things. But I don’t see any better ideas on the table.
