What if I told you that plans exist to put vast numbers of Americans into camps where they will be stripped of all civil liberties, potentially be subjects in medical expiriments, exposed to great physical harm, violent demands, and even swift execution without a trial by jury? What if I told you that some of you had explicitly asked for or endorsed the idea recently? Be careful what you ask for...
Because you might get it.
When the election went to Democrats many of us did a double-take and said "Ruh Roh," like Scooby-Doo, even without a clear idea why yet. My gut feeling all along was that the Republicans were screwed as long as they possessed total governmental control because that would make them the logical root of subsequent problems no matter how good at scapegoating others they are. The only solution to that problem would be to share power, ostensibly.
When Bush said that the elections meant Democrats would get some, if not most, if not all of what "they" wanted that made me say "Ruh Roh" deep in my soul. But I didn't know why. Not for sure. The pieces were all there and I had shaken my head at each in turn, but now at last the picture is coming clear. And it ain't pretty.
The Decider is going to play a game we dimly remember from schoolyard bullies and the evil genies in nursery stories. He's going to do various things that certain Democrats have asked for in the past few years, in a certain combination and in a certain way that we will sorely regret being at all associated with.
I'm not going to deepen that association by tracking down which Democrats said what, and when. But Democrats, some Democrats, did indeed ask for a draft. And some Democrats proposed an increase in the overall size of the military. Some, not necessarily the same, asked for an increase in the number of US troops in Iraq, as I recall. Certainly others suggested we needed to really focus on getting tough with Iran, North Korea, and indeed Venezuela. I'm sure the list is longer and that it will grow now.
It's not an orginal point, to take "our" politicians to task for proposing things like a draft. And it is dreadfully unoriginal for people to come out of the woodwork to defend those concepts here, people who the rest of us might otherwise imagine we had something remotely in common with. So I'm not going to do that.
The Democratic Party is about half of the country, right? Or half of the two thirds or less that cares at all. That's not even remotely as homogenous a group as the Republicans, because of our natural tendency over them to value free thinking. But the point is that even on the things we more or less agree on, our underlying reasoning and even our long-term aims can vary greatly. But our politicians and leading advocates have a tendency, maybe as a reaction to this, to talk about the "common" this and that, to ask us to ask what we can do for our country, instead of doing their duly elected job to make our country serve whom it should serve... It's people. Not "the people" mind you, but people individually...
...People who don't want a draft because they personally don't want to be dragged away from their families or have a chain of events set in motion whereby several years out their kids could be dragged away from them to fight in an ongoing conflict anywhere in the world including a few very likely places. People, in short, who are not "selfish," but are merely real people who are not some idealized unit of a fictitious collective. People, in short, who don't give remotely as much of a rat's ass about how representative the military is of society at large and even of the moral involvment of society in the use of the military, as they do their families and responsibilities toward them to stay home and whole.
It's shocking to have to explain this to progressives. It's shocking to realize the draft is very real, like some ancient Aztec who thought human sacrifice was old news or abstract until his number came up. But, considering all the talk here about "common" thises and thats, and about how in criticizing this war "no one" is condemning war, that it comes to this. It shouldn't be surprising because not more than a few short years ago, post invasion, I myself was openly wondering about a draft.
!!!
What changed? An ongoing awakening albeit from a safe distance regarding the real consequences of war, and furthermore a better understanding that no good can come of it. War is a tool of destruction only. When there is no redeeming value, and great aggressive evil, in what is destroyed it can be useful, kind of like cutting off a rotted limb. But it is not a tool for shaping nations, painting schools, or protecting people. A military cannot do that very well just as a bonesaw cannot do reconstructive surgery.
It's not the fault of the steel that bonesaw is made of, or of its design; but the use it is put to is all wrong. And American society, even the progressive slice of it, is not yet and may never be ready to reevaluate that falsehood. Just consider all the pointless wars, many of which you may (as I did only a few short years ago) know next to nothing about. Those wars taught America nothing, collectively. All that is "common" is willful ignorance and blissful arrogance. A draft isn't going to help, a draft has never helped. What might help is for once not having a draft at a time like this, and forgoing an otherwise inevitable spiral.
If, by 2008, the Democratic Party is still talking sense about war, but backing a draft, and the Republicans are still crazy but opposing a draft, who will be the crazier ones? I don't know. But I do know that nobody who is cheerleading for war on general principles will get my vote, but neither will anyone who wants to take random Americans off the street to do with whatever the currently decided Decider wishes? Credit to Bush where it's due, he has opposed the draft. Whatever his motives are, that doesn't really matter here. Whatever the motives of anyone proposing a draft are don't matter either. We all know how the road to Hell is paved. Well, we know the saying. But do we really know it yet, or what?