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Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
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Friday, November 24, 2006Drafty
When I voted two and a half weeks ago, I voted mostly straight down the Green Party line. I'm a registered Green and I feel strongly that the two-party system that's had a strangle-hold on American politics for the last hundred-plus years has reached a point where it no longer works. So I use my vote to protest it and to make at least some attempt to help create a viable third party. I'm helped by the fact that I live in a heavily Democratic city and state, where there was absolutely no question of who was going to be our Senator, who was going to be our governor, etc. Eliot Spitzer didn't need my vote; Hillary Clinton didn't need my vote.
Charles Rangel didn't need my vote, either, but I gave it to him, anyway. I like Congressman Rangel. I like his outspokenness. I like the fact that he's never seemed like a man who's using his seat in the House as a stepping-stone to something bigger. He's always seemed to me like the kind of person who embodies the virtues of the Career Politician: a man who wants to represent the people of his district and do for them what he can. And I admire what he's doing with his proposal to reinstate the draft. It won't happen. We know that. He knows that. That's not the point. The point is to start a dialogue. The point is to draw national focus to the unfairness of the way our armed forces currently do business. The men and women who serve in our military are there because they volunteered. I can't pretend to know all the various reasons why someone would choose to enlist, but I imagine some of them have done so out of a sense of patriotism. Some have probably joined up because they admire soldiers and have always aspired to be one. Some have undoubtedly done it because it's a smart way to receive high-tech training and/or qualify for college loans. And there are likely some who joined because they didn't have many other options. But of all the men and women who signed up over the last six years, how many of them do you think realized, when they signed the papers, that they were in danger of being stuck in the middle of an insurgency as violent as what we're seeing now? How many of them imagined that they'd be sent on multiple tours of duty, sometimes believing they'd come home for good, only to be informed that their service was not enough and that they'd be once again put in harm's way? For these relatively few people to bear such a burden for all of us is unfair. Especially when our leaders seem to spend so little time considering what that burden means. Our Congress is meant to act as a brake on reckless executive action. They're meant to be more considerate than the President; to debate an issue thoroughly before action is taken. They didn't do that this time. And so our volunteer army has paid the price. A draft would, at the very least, force our leaders--all of them--to think things through a little bit more clearly, because the price being paid would not be limited to those few who "volunteered". It's not perfect. It would force people with no interest in the military to take up a lifestyle not of their choosing. And those with means, I suppose, would still find a way to get around it. (See Bush, Cheney, etc.) It wouldn't solve all of the problems with our military. What it would do is to keep us from entering as lightly into conflicts as we have in Iraq. And, again, it's not going to happen. The people with money do not want to see something like this, so they won't allow it. But I thank Charles Rangel for bringing it up. And, hopefully, it will start a dialogue about things we can do to take some of the burden off the men and women in our armed services.
Comments:
Perhaps wars would end if the politicians and leaders who chose to enter them had to fight in them on the frontlines, (or at least their grown children).
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I respect your voting the Green Party ticket, but I'd rather have a two party stranglehold than a Republican stranglehold and Green voters in certain states may have led to this during prior elections. I'm not sure how we can get out this predicament since it takes so much money to win elections. Perhaps using an internet grass roots approach is the only way to go to get young people to vote their conscience. I think it has a lot to do with my post on who the selfish generations really are... http://uh2l.blogs.com/things_ive_noticed/2006/08/the_real_selfis.html
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 : 2:39 PM
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