"My recruiter lied to me"....
30+ years ago when I was in Basic training, this was perhaps the most heard phrase in basic. Grow up, get over it, and move on.
As far as the military being "discriminatory" towards gays, SO WHAT! Military service is NOT life in society in general. You do NOT have the same rights as ordinary citizens. You voluntarily agree to that before you join. That is a fact. Trouble is some people don't bother to understand that. The military does not promise you a sex life, of any kind. In fact they go quite a ways toward seeing that you don't have one, if it, in any way contrbutes to the betterment of the service. And YOU don't get to make that decision. Many things have changed over time, but some things don't, and one of them is that the military is not about the rights and priveledges of those serving.
You don't get treated fair, and you don't get treated like a civilian in a uniform. You get what the powers that be decide is best for you as a component of the service. Your individual wants and "needs" don't matter. Nor should they. I hated it when I was in, but over time, I came to realized that it isn't all about me. There are bigger, more important things than what makes me happy and feeling good about myself and my situation.
Blaming the military for being what they are, and opposing recruiters makes those folks (and I am not using Left or Liberal here on purpose) feel good. The same way gun control makes them feel good. The reasoning is the same. There is something they dislike (violence) and they are blaming the tools instead of those who actually create the situation. They don't like the war in Iraq (or the way it is being handled), so since they can't actually do anything about the war, they snub the military, any and every way they can. Just as they don't like (and who does) violence/crime but instead of blaming the criminals for their deeds, their solution is to blame guns.
They don't have the stomach to do something permanent about the who misuse guns, but they can do something about an inanimate object, so they do. And I see this anti-recruiting effort as the same level of emotional response.
Of course recruiters lie. By omission or by comission. If they told the absolute truth, very few would join, because military service is looked down on by a significant portion of our population. I think they are wrong, but that doesn't change anything. And, signing up for service at a time when there are actual combat operations going on is not something lots of folks are willing to do, today. If there is ever another event like Sept 11, 2001, you will see that change drastically, for a year or so. Just like it did then, like it did after Pearl Harbor.
But the longer you drag things out, without a clear cut enemy, and without a clear method of defining victory, the fewer poeple are willing to lay it on the line. While I do not doubt we are "winning" (at least in the sense that the "enemy" has not been able to mount another attack), we have not won in the sense most poeple can understand. Unlike WWII, we are not fighting the uniformed military of any nation state, so a clear cut victory is not possible. There just isn't any governing body to surrender, and even if there were, many of the individuals would not recognise or be bound by it's decision.
Perhaps a wiser choice (although costlier in terms of US citizens lives) would have been for the administration not to persue the terrorists in Iraq or other places (although we felt pretty good about Afganistan), until they mount another attack against us. There is something to be said for taking the hit, getting public sentiment firmly behind it, and then going out and kicking ass. I don't recall any of the folks currently screaming and whining about the war in Iraq saying anything anti war in the months after 9/11. People, all our people were mad, and wanted vengance. Call it whatever, that is what it was. Today, that rage isn't there. Like somebody said earlier (and a great phrase it is) "America isn't at war. The troops are at war. America is at the mall."
"If I was going to commit any kind of money in recognition of war, then it should be toward peace, given what our war is in Iraq right now," Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said
If he really means that, I wonder that the good supervisor isn't spending money for nuclear weapons, since they were what "brought us peace" at the end of WWII. Rejecting a WWII battleship as a memorial because one doesn't agree with the policies of the current administration....I just don't see the sense it it. To me that is in the same category as blaming your deceased grandfather because your son isn't a camel.
