- Young people have high university and college debts.
- Young people are disillusioned with educational options and costs.
- Some people oppose the draft as a solution to America's recruitment shortfalls, however, no one is discussing drastic reduction in American military waste and over-expansion of budgets each year.
- The media and propaganda budget of the USA government's military machines overwhelm young people in debt.
- Seldom carried-out, short-term promises by recruiters claiming that benefits will be bequeathed upon the enlistees are made.
- Little or no mention of how one can be killed or maimed in war is made in the whole cynical process.
- The source and causes of America's fear is not discussed.
I advise America to take all these issues more seriously as the 2008 elections surface.
Since 1975 when America last walked away from its call to a war is now a long time ago, student debt has expanded exponentially. Sadly, the debts that young people are paying for education are not going away soon. So, recruitment of America's poor and disillusioned will continue.
Lethargy cannot be the answer. America has to begin now offering a less illusionary and disillusionary futures for the young people growing up there.
The options in education have to be expanded and cost issue have to be wresteled to the ground.
Moreover, the advise we give our young must be more trustworthy, and higher education leaders need to get off their laurels and begin to reduce the cynicism that leads people of all ages to believe that between big education debts and big military options, Americans have no other future.
American progressives and conservatives are going to have to promote $20,000 bonuses to young Americans who want to serve in inner cities, rebuild Louisiana after Katarina, or actually desire to help old people in their own home towns.
In short, America, if we restructure our priorities, there would be less disillusionment for American youth!
Currently, I am working in Kuwait where a large U.S. military base is located. Most of the 30,000 young soldiers here aren't allowed off the base to learn to know local Kuwaitis or other Arabs. These young people continue to be cocooned in the propaganda arms of a military industrial machine which paints the world as a fearful place where only Americans can be your friends abroad.
On the other hand, there are also many former young people (who formerly served in America's armed forces for noble reasons or to learn a skill) who come to Kuwait and help milk the military industrial machine as foreign contractors servicing American armed services in Iraq and around the Gulf region.
However, many of these Americans are no longer capable, neither willing nor able to improving the American pro-military support the system they have grown up a part of.
I have asked some of these American contactors-most of whom never cross into the much more dangerous land of Iraq-whether they (1) don't feel some sort of desire to stop the cynical dependency cycle they are part of and whether there wsn't some way that they might (2) promote more people-to-people exchanges in the region for these poor young American troops-whom are locked up on base most of their time in Kuwait before being sent over to Iraq or after one year simply returned home.
Many of these contractors dependent on the war-machine are bright people but they don't question what they or their firms are up to.
Nor do they question the educational and recruiting system that made them-these military support contractors--what they are today. Even if these contractors do go across the border to Iraq, most of them don't analyze much beyond their own little world-as a cog in a big machine.
One talented contractor for ITT stated, "I'm just a spectator here."
That man just laughed at the deeper thinking that might require him to admit or confess the truth: "After Auschwitz and Nuremburg, there are no spectators, i.e. the world cannot simply be divided into simple categories of Victims, Perpetrators, and Spectators."
As a lifelong historian and educator, I want to shout; "The fact is that when America is at war, no American should ever think there are clear distinctions between victims, perpetrators and spectators." Once these distinctions are properly ignored, we can then begin to think more universally-more truly globally and compassionately.
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