Particularly
telling is a training exercise for the Explorers program, which trains young people
for careers in law enforcement, in which teenaged boys and girls dressed like
quasi-SWAT teams and armed with pellet guns attempt to take down "a disgruntled
Iraq war veteran [who] has already taken out two people, one slumped in his
desk, the other covered in blood on the floor." As a side note: this Explorers
program, an extension of the Boy Scouts, is unnervingly similar to the Hitler
Youth program used by the Nazis to indoctrinate young people into a police-state mindset, chillingly documented by H.W. Koch in The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945.
This
brings me back to present-day America, with its penchant for endless wars that
empty our national coffers while fattening those of the military-industrial
complex. Does anyone else find it heartbreaking and ironic that we raise our young
people on a steady diet of violence and military action, sell them on the idea
that defending freedom abroad by serving in the military is their patriotic
duty, then when they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and suddenly
serious about defending their freedoms at home, we treat them like criminal
suspects?
Brandon
Raub understands this all too well. While still serving with the Marines in
Afghanistan in November 2011, Raub put pen to paper in order to flesh out some
of his concerns about the dismantling of freedom in America. His concerns echo
those of countless Americans like myself dismayed at the nation's descent into
authoritarianism:
America has lost itself. We have lost who we truly are. They are controlling your media. They have dumbed you down through your school systems. They have systematically dismantled the constitution. It is in rags. The bill of rights is being systematically dismantled. Men have spilled their blood for those rights. Your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, and America's best young men and women are losing their limbs. They are losing their lives. They are losing the hearts. They do not know why they are fighting. They are killing. And they do not know why. They have done some extraordinary acts. Their deeds go before them. But these wars are lies. They are lies. They deceived our entire nation with terrorism. They have gotten us to hand them our rights. We gave them the keys to our country. We were not vigilant with our republic. There is hope. BUT WE MUST TAKE OUR REPUBLIC BACK.
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