COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: War Protests: General
How strong is our allegiance to freedom?
Mark McCormic, Kansas.com
Nov. 13, 2005
Intelligent people ask questions. Good questions. Probing questions. Questions that make people uncomfortable.When West High senior Louis Goseland attended a career fair last week at Century II, he posed some good, probing questions that made a military recruiter uncomfortable.
Those questions got him removed from the fair.
Louis said recruiters often present military service as a way to earn college money or gain valuable technical training. So he asked a recruiter, with other students looking on: How many recruits actually earn their diploma? How often do people actually get the training featured in advertising campaigns? Why are so many veterans homeless?
"I'm not anti-military by any means," he told me Thursday, "but the statistics show that the military isn't a jobs program. It is there to prepare for and to fight wars.... People shouldn't look at it as a gateway to other opportunities. I want people to understand it wholly before jumping into it."
Fair questions, it seems to me. If universities have to track graduation rates, why shouldn't the Army?
But Louis said fair organizers asked him to leave.
I guess we're fighting for freedom over there so that we won't be bothered with freedom over here. This is a shame.
School officials verified that a guidance counselor and police officer escorted Louis out. Despite two days of calling and assistance from other local recruiters who said they'd heard about the dust-up, I couldn't contact the recruiter Louis questioned.
If Louis' name sounds familiar, its because he helped organize a counter-demonstration in October against a church that had sponsored a noisy anti-abortion rally at West High School the previous week.
Reading his comments in The Eagle and seeing the way he conducted himself then, he struck me as an impressive young man.
I could also see how some people might consider him a bothersome antagonist. Why?
Because we need a certain amount of conformity to help our civilization run smoothly. We can't, for example, just decide that we don't feel like driving on the right side of the road anymore and start driving on the left side. We need order.
There's honor in following orders. Doing what we're told to do. We call that discipline.
But then here comes Louis, upsetting the process.
He has an anti-war agenda.
He enjoys stirring the pot.
And if you don't agree with him, he can come off like a snot.
All I'd ask is that Louis pose these questions respectfully.
The people volunteering to defend our country protect his right to pose these questions. They've earned that respect.
In one of my favorite movies, "A Few Good Men," a U.S. Marine colonel played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson said, "We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use those words as the backbone of a life spent defending something.... I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the very blanket of freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it."
Can't argue with that, but there's also honor in us civilians questioning authority.
For all of our talk about freedom, strong currents of conformity flow through society.
But conformity should never be the litmus test for patriotism.
And if we're tossing bright kids out of career fairs for asking uncomfortable questions, we need to be asking ourselves a whole lot of questions.
Namely, about our own commitment to freedom.
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