I went into the Marine Corps because the draft was just around the corner and I wanted options. I wasn’t going to sit on my ass and wait until the draft board
picked those options for me.

There’s no draft here anymore. People in the military are now considered to be volunteers. Volunteer is an odd word for someone with no options for civilian employment. People who volunteer to go get their ass shot off are not the kind of neighbors you want to spend any time with.

Most of the people I served with in the military were without a doubt the dumbest bunch of illiterate assholes I’ve ever been with in my life. Translate the phrase “hoo-yaah” as shouted out by hormone hopped up military trainees and you discover it means ” I’m a dumb fuck.”

It also means youre a murderer. The military trains people to murder other people legally. You don’t come back from war with notches on your belt for every man woman or child you killed and find yourself being brought up on murder charges. Instead you get “medals.” Medals are handed out for extraordinary action beyond the call of duty. That means you killed a lot of people or you saved a bunch of your killers from the killers on the other side of whatever political orgy is fueling “your war.” Medals are also a way to avoid paying you the kind of money you should be paid for furthering the interests of warrior capitalism. Understand that and you might not be as anxious to conscript your life and the horrible karma that follows by signing up to be some oil company’s hit man.

Join the military and you understand that your job is not “defending ” the country, but murdering people in other countries because they refuse to accept our values. If nations don’t accept our offers of raping their economies, seeding ethic hatreds, and walking off with the profits, then those nations are deemed a threat to us and consequently must be brought into line. Let’s shut off all the oil and steel imports into Japan because they defied us and invaded Burma. Let’s use our Navy to enforce those embargos. Gee… I hope the Japs don’t attack our fleet at Pearl Harbor to stop the embargo.

War is an evolutionary aspect of human conduct, no doubt tucked into the DNA of the species. Until that genome is neutralized or, as researchers like to describe it, “turned off,” war will continue and economies will use war as a convenient excuse to elevate their own economic outlook at the expense of someone else’s prosperity.

Once we understand that war is murder at the request of elected national hoodlums, we will understand that young men and young women, shy of any life experience, will continue to be loaded into the firing chambers of someone else’s greed.

This blog will be continued……

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Stuff I know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.