Call to arms

Here's my soap box for the day. I think we need to bring back the draft. The most recent incident involving our soldiers abroad, i.e., the shooting of 16 innocent Afghan civilians, most of them women and children, "allegedly" by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, points up one of the big drawbacks of our continuing to rely on a volunteer army. That army gets spread too thin. Bales had had three combat tours in Iraq -- being wounded twice -- before being sent to Afghanistan. He didn't want to go, had thought he wouldn't have to go, but go he did...and, apparently, snapped.

A number of possible contributing factors to this mad act have been mentioned by the press: the severe wounding of a friend of Bales' a few days before, the fact that Bales resented having been passed over for a promotion, an apparent problem dealing with anger, as indicated by his having had to take an anger management course for an assault case that was later dropped, when he was a civilian, possible marital tensions. While any or all of those may have contributed to Bales' going over the edge, I suspect that a major contributor was that he was simply worn out with what must have come to seem like pointless war.

Of course, other soldiers also put in multiple tours, have problems in their marriages, lose friends in combat, and do not snap and go murder a bunch of women and children while they sleep. But many of those soldiers do come back with various mental problems, which adversely affect their attempts to adjust to life after combat duty.

I don't see anything wrong with a country requiring a period of public service duty of all of its able-bodied citizens, female as well as male. I'm not a proponent of females doing combat duty, but there are many other ways they can (and do) serve. And I think being in the military for a while would do most young people a heckuva lot of good. Get them out of the damn malls, and off their i-phones; teach them discipline, responsibility, how to defend themselves and others, have them meeting and having to work with/get along with all kinds of people.

I do realize that there are some people who are wholly unsuited to military life. I would have been one of them -- I'm sure if I had been drafted I would have spent an inordinate amount of time in the brig, for insubordination, since I would have balked at any order I considered stupid or unreasonable. Perhaps young people should have a choice: working for two years in something like the state version of the old CCC, that exists in many states (see Note of Aug. 3, 2008), or spending those two years in the military. At any rate, serving their country. Then we really would "all be in this together."

In preparation for the future

I just returned from several days spent in upstate New York. I went with two purposes in mind. One was to watch the son of one of my college roommates graduate (as salutatorian) from high school. I've mentioned this delightful family before (see Note of June 8, 2009); it's always a great pleasure to spend time with them, and Bryan is a very nice, smart, funny kid, so I felt inclined to witness this rite of passage of his.

There were a couple of noteworthy things about the graduation ceremony, as far as I was concerned. One was the row of kids sitting right in back of us who were determined to make as much noise as they possibly could, every time anyone they knew crossed to get his/her diploma. I couldn't help wondering why there were no adults with them, why no adults from the school made any attempt to calm them down. Eventually I turned around and said, "Guys, let's hold it down a little," because I dislike the adult abdication-of-responsibility thing. One of the kids actually said, "Sorry," and they were a tiny bit less obnoxious over the next few names called.

The other thing I noticed was the obviously casual dress of many of the graduating students, underneath their graduation robes. A lot of the girls wore flip-flops -- a phenomenon I'd also noticed at the college graduation of my goddaughter last year -- although a decent number wore heals. But what I found really appalling were all the boys with bare legs showing beneath their robes -- evidence that they were wearing shorts -- with big clunky shoes or sneakers worn without socks to finish off the look. Good grief. Why on earth didn't their parents insist that they wear slacks, shoes and socks?

Quite possibly because they didn't think it was important. People so rarely dress up for anything anymore, even going to church. Maybe wearing shorts on a hot summer's day seemed practical to those parents...but note that the event took place in a very air-conditioned "Events Center" at Binghamton University. And come on, if graduating is such a special occasion, doesn't it deserves a little something special in attire?

My friend Clifford occasionally bewails the (as he sees it) complete moral deterioration of the country. I'm not sure I can concur with that, but I myself am dismayed by the national deterioration in dress standards. I miss seeing people look nice. I deeply regret that people no longer seem to think "looking nice" matters. All that's important is being comfortable, which all too often translates into looking like a slob. And if you're young it's important to look like your peers, so you all look like slobs, or tacky (the slut look) or stupid (the baggy pants).

My friend Joey has a very entertaining photo blog, which you can access through the Fascinating Photos link on this blog. He often takes pictures of people he sees at state fairs (he loves going to state fairs), the horse races, or just on the street. In many of these pictures the way people are dressed is frightful. They would say they're dressed "casual;" I would have to say they are dressed without style, taste, grace or any idea of what looks good on them.

But whaterya gonna do. Supposedly fashions go in cycles, so I'm waiting (have been waiting for quite some time) for the more formal style to swing back around. Like hats! Remember when everybody wore a hat for special occasions? Heck, men used to wear a hat all the time. Every time I see an old movie in which even the criminals wear hats -- not backwards or sideways baseball caps but fedoras and Milans and Panamas -- I think what a shame it is that particular fashion has gone out of fashion. Will it ever return? Along with stockings (everybody goes bare-legged now, even when wearing cocktail dresses!), and the occasional "nice" dress? We can only hope.

The other reason for my trip to New York appears in my next posting.

One thought leads to another

I don’t know how many of you watched the public television show “Carrier,” about life on board the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier. The show ran in its entirety here in Maine over several nights a few months ago, and now they’re rerunning it in hour-long segments every week. I watched it the first time, and found it fascinating, although I occasionally felt they concentrated too much on a particular crew member (the young fellow with the pregnant girlfriend back home), and gave too much air time to the Pentecostal group, in the segment on religion on board ship. The Pentacostals seemed to be a very small group, out of all those people on board, to receive so much attention from the producers, and I suspected it was because their services were a little more “out there” than the more staid services of the other denominations.

I also took exception to the final segment, when the cameras followed some of the crew to their very homes and, it seemed to me, invaded their privacy to a really egregious extent. Of course, these crew members had agreed to be followed in this way, but I felt it made the show slip over the line into the unpleasantly voyeuristic...from the pleasantly voyeuristic, I suppose.

But overall I thought it was T.V. at its best: informative, while being entertaining. And one thing I learned, that amazed me, was how young most of these sailors are. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. And working at extremely demanding, stressful, important jobs. And doing a good job! They are still in many ways immature – one older sailor declares the ship is like one big high school – but the navy is teaching them discipline, and responsibility, and they are able to take a well-deserved pride in their contribution to the running of the ship.

Seeing this made me think of something else, the work programs established by Franklyn Roosevelt during the Depression. I was thinking it was the WPA I had in mind, but a dip into that highly useful if not always reliable People’s Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, showed me it was the CCC – the Civilian Conservation Corps – I was really thinking of. The WPA did have a number of work projects, that produced things like bridges, post offices, guidebooks by authors, what has proved to be invaluable photographic records of conditions of the time by various photographers, etc. But the CCC was especially developed to put young men to work. According to Wikipedia they planted trees, constructed shelters and trails in state and national parks, built fences, roads, including logging and fire roads, even installed phone and power lines. My father worked in the CCC for a while, and it was a godsend for him, as it was for many young men.

And I thought, why don’t we have something like that now? Something besides the military that could instill some discipline and a sense of responsibility into young people (have to include both sexes these days), something that would enable the young men, at least, to work off some of that energy and free-floating testosterone in productive ways. I’ve actually had this thought before, when I would see young men just hanging out, begging for the opportunity to get into trouble. Or I’d think about all those kids being destroyed in gangs, because they have nothing else that makes them feel important, gives them a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves.

And now I discover that we do have something like that! Again according to Wikipedia, 41 states have some form of a CCC program. So why don’t we hear more about them? How many young people are actually involved in them? Are these organizations going into the ghettos and recruiting? Hmmm...