Tuesday, February 25, 2014

If you don't understand this, don't worry about it.

https://docs.google.com/a/ga.ozark.k12.mo.us/document/d/1mUbrP0AzMcpovLZiE4NHuQWLCMPNQmUfaN1nOz0RlLs/edit?usp=sharing

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Army Strong?

Firstly, I must apologize for not blogging in awhile. My schedule has been rather busy. I know that's no excuse. I committed to this; therefore, its my responsibility to continue it. I just find it difficult to commit to things. I'm easily bored I suppose. But enough of that...

Last month, in preparation for debate, I read several articles on militarism and its effects. I was basically trying to find reasons for why war was bad beyond the statistics. It seemed rather cliche to simply say that war is bad because people die. I wanted to bring things beyond that. I wanted to give a survey of all of the evils of militarism.

In my search, I found a wonderful article written by Chris J. Cuomo, a Professor at the University of Cincinnati. It was titled "War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence". Now, the article was published in an academic journal, so if I tried to summarize it, I could not do it justice, but there were a few key things that stood out to me and made me think.

"...many of the questions about war that are of interest are how large-scale, state-sponsored violence affects women and’ members of other oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gen­dered, raced, and nationalistic political realities and moral imaginations; what such violence consists of and why it persists; how it is related to other oppressive and violent institutions and hegemonies-cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events. These issues are not merely a matter of good or bad intentions and identifiable decisions."

These are interesting questions indeed. Surely war affects more than surface things like mortality. There are many implications to war- and the author of the article is correct when he says that they are not matters of identifiable decisions. I wonder if they are identifiable at all. Can we really know the adverse affects that our county's military has inflicted? Can we really identify how it has changed people in both domestic and foreign lands?

The author goes on to say later in the essay:
"Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant pres­ence of militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses."

We do not know what we are creating when we send legions of troops overseas. We do not know what sort of dogmas are being embedded in the minds of our youths as we train them up to love the military and regard it with unwavering respect. So often we tend to think that to love America we must love our military too. I wonder at the delusion of my friends who think that the size of our military is reasonable. It really isn't...


Our country is not currently engaged in any significant crises with foreign powers, and yet people thank soldiers for keeping our nation safe, as if our nation's security would be compromised without millions of troops training for some sort of impending combat. There is a great mistrust in this- a mistrust of diplomacy which prevails when steady minds are in power (which, for the most part, they currently are). The author of the article did not touch on the effects that militarism has on our nation specifically, but he did make me think about them. So, I'd like to talk about some of them for awhile...

Like all public schools, Ozark High has ROTC. A marvelous organization that allows students to wear uniforms, cut their hair to respectable lengths, march around in an organized fashion, twirl flags (and sometimes fake rifles), obey a collection of old Republicans who have (for whatever reason) been bestowed the designation of "sergeant", and learn other nationalistic bullshit. Many participants in this absurdity have gone on to join the military. I haven't really ascertained exactly what motivated them to do this, but I hope that it wasn't out of some absurd desire to protect our country. I think that the desire for a piece of the $682 billion dollar military budget would be more commendable than that delusion, but it's clear to me that many of our nation's youth believe what our military's propaganda tells them- that their nation needs them, that it is commendable to believe what a collection of totalitarianists tell them, to learn how to kill people and use that ability on command. Surely this is the trade of weak-minded people. 

They say that those who are in the army are strong, that there is a distinction between "strong" and "army strong". What bullshit! Taking lives is nothing to be taken lightly and without discernible reasons to do so, it should be avoided at all costs. Individuals should not kill simply because elected superiors tell them to. That is blind obedience- cowardly self-subjugation. That is not strong, regardless of intentions. 

Indoctrination seems to be the goal of proponents of the military. When the IB program was being implemented by the Ozark school district, a group of right-wing extremists (headed by "sergeants" of our school's ROTC) opposed it saying that IB would undermine the Christian and nationalistic values of our humble, little town. They wanted to stop the implementation of one of the best college-prep initiatives simply because they were afraid of the IBO's international-mindedness. I find it rather ironic that they were afraid of the consequences of implementing an acclaimed education program, but they have no problem giving their undying support to an institution responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people. 

So fuck the military, fuck ROTC, fuck you right-wing, deluded, "sergeants" of that same institution.