We have a problem, as everyone knows, finding people to serve in the Armed Forces. A columnist in today’s Courant has the answer.
Before the answer is revealed, however, he finds it necessary to libel every high school student and, by extension, every high school teacher in America:
Military recruiters are wasting time and energy trolling high school halls for manpower. Take a look at so many high school classrooms: You’ll see rooms strewn with abused books, crumpled bags of chips, emptied cans of soda; you’ll see dissipation and contempt.
The writer should know, one assumes, though he provides no evidence and he doesn’t teach high school.
Things must have changed radically in the past few years. My kids were in high school not that long ago, and I seem to recall that they, along with many of their contemporaries, were hard working, serious kids. The universal dissipation and contempt must be a recent phenomenon.
But not to worry, we have another institution just chock full of people with the seriousness of purpose, and most importantly, the need for structure so inherent in military life: our prisons. In fact, many of our time serving felons yearn for the chance to enter the Armed Forces. Indeed, their prison experience admirably suits them for a military career:
Inmates live by regimens, [one inmate] said, which should be viewed as a qualification.
I’m as ready as the next person to believe that almost anyone (sorry, Karl, George, Abu, etc., not everyone) can be redeemed. Still, I can’t help thinking that those prisoners, or most of them, went to high school, and there’s a better than even chance that they were highly ranked in the dissipation and contempt scale. In fact, to a great extent, it was their very leadership on that score that landed them in prison. Maybe it’s a good idea to stock our armed forces with convicted felons, but, given the problems we already have with torture and civilian killings, perhaps we ought to think twice about focusing our recruitment efforts in our prisons.
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