On September 24th 3 days of war protest will begin in our nations capital. United For Peace And Justice. The hoedown thrown to stage what amounted to a celebration of the anniversary of 9-11 and which added to its creepiness factor be being largely ignored and populated mainly by coerced Pentagon employees and their families, was in some part meant to counter what they knew was coming on the 24th. It was a self-conscious display of the inner workings of Donald Rumsfeld’s mind filled with not only his failures in Iraq, but in its pro troops rhetoric, his own protest and denial of the fact the military is a desperate institution.

Rummy threw a jingoist propagandafest and nobody came. More and more Americans are catching on to what the world and “America hating liberals” knew years ago, and they cannot stomach the twisted and reprehensible using of 9-11 to promote the strategic maneuvers in the Middle East and perverted tendency to try and turn lack of support and non-mindless capitulation into attacks on troops. But soldiers themselves have spoken out in droves along with high ranking military officials. With support for Bush dropping it will be interesting to see how much more support and attention the anti war protest gets in comparison to the 11th. This includes the media coverage now that they’ve started to wake from their 5 year slumber and been forced by that inevitable cold hard slap of reality to to be a bit less right wing as they would like left to their own devices and the inability to forever alter reality to fit their corporately designed version.

Bush and the Pentagon have a real mess on their hands and they know it. And they need look no further than their own military. Recruiting quotas are way down and they’ve had to increase the recruiting budget $500 million in a desperate attempt to find more coercive measures to get the desperate and downtroden to enlist. Not exactly new. They’ve always used unethical tactics to get the many kids our system pushes away from the resources of the fortunate. A NY Times report a couple of years back reported how recruiters would show kids how to cheat on testing, fudge police records and make drug arrests dissapear.

They’ve done the studies. The Pentagon knows what joining the military is about for the vast majority of its recruits. They know its not patriotism. They can wax poetically about supporting those men and women fighting for democracy and America but they are armed with a full slate of research and long standing recruiting policies to match, that tells them who these kids are and why they’re there. Almost half of recruits are from the south and most of their ROTC programs run in the south or urban minority areas. About 15% of recruits come from the more educated and affluent north eastern areas and only 8% from families with professional backgrounds. The Nation

What these kids have traditionally been fighting for is an education and livelihood which their socio-economic means make them desperate enough to feel they can only get through enlisting. Blacks and the poor have always been a target. Recruiters are given training and handbooks on how to identify and coerce kids with limited options, subpar grades, struggling economic situations, and limited job options. The military has always used the Solomon Amendment which gives federal funding to collegess in return for providing recruiters access to students. A lilttle known element of No Child Left Behind also provides for access at high schools and includes the schools sharing of personal information about kids.

Schools also help mislead kids and parents into thinking that the ASVAB test is mandatory and a “career exploration program.” (See above link). In reality this is an elective test the military uses to identify potential recruits and place them in the system. Alot of these recruiters are encouraged to act, as what amounts to moles or spies. They volunteer to coach schools sports teams to get cozy and i.d. those susceptable to enlisting. They act as chaperones for school activities and find the popular leaders who they are taught probably wont enlist due to their greater opportunity coming from their standing as the team quarterback or Honor Role student etc (they call them COI’s for Centers Of Influence), but will know and be able to influence those who are not so lucky.

Increasingly now, as the above Nation link reports, they are using methods like these to target younger kids all the way down to the 6th grade. After school pre Jr ROTC programs are being instituted at grade and elementary schools and has kids marching around with wooden guns and singing things like, “I used to date a high school queen/Now I lug an M-16.” Stats show that close to half of ROTC students in the past have ended up enlisting so they are stepping up efforts to beat the burgeoning anti-military sensitivity to the punch and give these kids what they are calling, “adventure training.”

But anti-war and parent groups have started catching on to some of these tactics and are trying to educate parents and students about their rights, the military’s false promises, and other alternatives. For instance kids dont have to take the ASVAB and parents can opt out of being part of their schools giving recruiters private info on their kids. The following links are for organizations involved in counter-recruitment efforts:
youth4peace
youthandthemilitary
wagingpeace
studentpeaceaction
Unitedforpeace

I am not a complete idealist. I realize we need a military in todays world. But even many conservatives are worried about our economic future as our defense budget continues to bloat and we become the worlds outsourcing source for weapons and manpower at the expense of other areas of the economy. There is also something cyclical and reciprocal in the nature of a system that needs to have such a huge portion of its population be desperate enough to play battlefield roulette with their sign up period when joining in an attempt to salvage some kind of future. Could the fact that recruiters are taught to target freshmen on college campuses who they know tend to be on shakier ground and more prone to dropping out, lacking in clear direction, and are just finding out that they don’t have the funds to keep up, also be a motivation in escalating college costs and cuts to financial aid programs? Is it an unspoken fringe benefit of economic policies favoring the rich to continue to foster a desperation among those needed to supply the ever widening mouth of war its teeth?

Maybe lower recruitment rates will force some good old American pragmatism and invention so that our foreign policies can start to reflect a need to stay out of conflict. If such shaky notions as morality, empathy, knowledge, and humanity wont do it maybe neccessity can.

I leave you with the rap lyrics of an 18 year old named Rayniel, who has taken a Quaker produced flyer from the American Friends Service Committee and embelished its message. The flyer gives kids a warning about enlisting with its, “Ten Points to Consider Before You Sign a Military Enlistment Agreement.” Points one through three advise young people to “not make a quick decision,” to “take a witness when speaking with a recruiter,” and to “talk with veterans.” Rayniel is part of a program at Manhattan’s West Side High School that gets vets involved in the debate and who’s principal, veteran Jim Murphy and Rayniel go around to NY schools recruiters have targeted, (they know to stay away from West Side), and offer an alternative point of view from a combanation of perspectives from the latters one of an inner city’s youth, to the formers as a Vietnam vet.

Think about ya life, the choices you make. Recruiters out to get you, don’t make a mistake./Is obvious, right, they target the ‘hood. Take a homeboy and write, what’s wrong and what’s good./My words are truth, heal like medicine. Don’t believe me? Man, holla at a veteran…Now do you wanna R.I.P., Rayniel from N.Y.C. telling you there’s no guarantee… J.O.B./ You have no clue. This is for the ones who keep it real in the military, you can’t be you./So think, listen and see. Is a puppet to America really “all you can be?

MotherJones Sep-Oct issue pg 26 if it can’t be linked.