[gpga-news] Lowering the Bar: Kindergarten Recruitment

[Hugh Esco]

Lowering the Bar: Kindergarten Recruitment
Tuesday 17 November 2009
by: Jon Letman, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

How old is old enough for students to be approached by military
recruiters?

High school? Junior high? Fourth grade? How about ten weeks into
kindergarten?

Last week at the dinner table, my five-year-old son announced blithely,
"Soldiers came to school today." He then added, "They only kill bad
people. They don't kill good people."

He made the announcement with the same levity he uses in recalling the
plot line of Frog and Toad or a Nemo video.

My wife and I looked at each other incredulously.

"Soldiers came to school? What do you mean?" I asked.

He repeated himself and then I remembered - it was "Career Day" at
school. My son mentioned a bus driver too, but it was the soldier who
stuck out in his mind. When my wife asked if the soldier was cool, he
nodded yes.

The soldier had given my five-year-old a gift. From his yellow
backpack, he produced a six-inch, white, plastic ruler with big, bold,
red letters reading "ARMY NATIONAL GUARD" next to a waving American
flag and below that  www.1-800-GO-GUARD.com.

So, now we know the answer to the above question.

Kindergarteners - children with Dora the Explorer and Spiderman
backpacks and bedrooms full of stuffed animals who are still working to
master their A-B-C's - are now targets for early conditioning by the US
military. Never mind that Hawaii's schools have just cut almost 10
percent of classroom time, dropping the state's public schools'
instructional days down to the fewest in the nation. Teacher furloughs
or not, time was found for the Army National Guard to give a pitch (and
a gift) to wide-eyed five-year-olds.

Fortunately (from the military's perspective), the economic collapse
has been a boon for military recruiters  as education and job-hungry
young people  flock to a place they know will offer what many other
employers cannot - a job with benefits.

And with Department of Defense projections indicating that the baseline
Pentagon budget will grow over the next decade by $133.1 billion, or 25
percent (even before war funding), it appears likely there will be
plenty need for more soldiers in 2022 when my son and his classmates
turn 18.

In his book "The Limits of Power,"  Boston University history Professor
and retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich describes a near future in
which the US is in an almost constant state of war. He writes, "Rather
than brief interventions ending in decisive victory, sustained presence
will be the norm ... The future will be one of small wars, expected to
be frequent, protracted, perhaps perpetual." If Bacevich's bleak
assessment proves true, it's no wonder the National Guard sees value in
chatting up kindergarteners.

After raising my concerns about military personnel pitching to my
five-year-old on career day to the school's principal, I was told the
soldiers (who were dressed in uniform) were there to focus on "the good
things they do." To be sure, in times of natural disaster, the National
Guard can do a tremendous amount of good.

But in what must certainly have been a first encounter for my son and
his classmates, the take-away message was "they kill people. But only
the bad ones."

As a parent, how does one explain what killing "only bad ones" means
when the child asks why a NATO airstrike obliterated dozens of
civilians, an unmanned drone flattened a mountain village killing
children just like them or a deeply disturbed soldier goes on a rampage
on a US base in Iraq  or in Texas , and projects the violence he has
learned against his fellow soldiers?

Whether you find the Army National Guard visiting kindergarteners
utterly disturbing or perfectly normal, each of us needs to ask
ourselves, in an era when our government spends trillions of dollars
supporting wars with no end in sight, at a time when we can't even fund
our schools or public services at a minimum standard and only
begrudgingly support health care reform, what kind of society and
future are we building for our children?

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-- 
Hugh Esco 
http://GeorgiaGreenParty.org