I saw him, he gave a good speech, I was somewhat inspired, but not fired up. The idealization of military service throughout the convention made me somewhat nauseous. <\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the military is there. It serves a vitally important role, and is a sometimes disgusting, sometimse dangerous job. <\/p>\n
However, I can’t help but hear an implied message that joining the military makes you a better person, and being shot at, and\/or taking a bullet makes you an even better person. Frequently ignoring that the people in question are usually dishing out some bullets of their own. And that these bullets scrambling someone’s internals, if they’re effective. Is this some sort of trading self-improvement with your enemy?<\/p>\n
I have a very conflicted view of the military, obviously. How much responsibility do individual soldiers have for the actions of the military as a whole? No more so than any other citizen to my mind. The soldiers are doing a job, the broad parameters of which are not theirs to choose. The individual soldiers conducting the abuses at Abu Ghraib are responsible to the extent that it was by their own choice that they did what they did. (I will certainly cut slack for indirect strongarm tactics, which I suspect were involved). <\/p>\n
When going to CMU, I seriously considered signing up with ROTC, so that I wouldn’t end up suckling my finances from the parental teat. I decided against it, because I wanted more autonomy that I felt that path would allow. And the whole homo thing didn’t help either. Note that at no point was this a “morality of maybe killing other people” decision. <\/p>\n
What do I think of an individual’s decision to joined the armed services? I can see a few basic motivations. 1) A desire to protect\/serve one’s country. Something worthy of respect, and gratitude, but not adoration. 2) A form of employment. It’s not a great job, the pay sucks, and one may well end up risking their life. There are definitely benefits (tuition, most notably). This is not as impressive a reason, but self improvement is a good thing. 3) A sense of connection\/belonging\/self-image etc. I find this reason more exhasperating, but comprehensible at least. Not really laudable, though. 4) So they can blow shit up\/kill people. I have a hard time imagining such a mindset. I’m not even entirely certain such people really exist, I kinda hope not. Obviously, not laudable. I’m probably missing a few, but I think you get the idea.<\/p>\n
Choosing to serve, for the sake of the greater good, is commendable. or at least a good intention. I question how much the armed services actually work towards the greater good, though. As passive prevention of engagement, great. As active intervention? I am more skeptical. Nobility may lead one to enlist, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who enlists is noble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw him, he gave a good speech, I was somewhat inspired, but not fired up. The idealization of military service throughout the convention made me somewhat nauseous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}