Name:
Location: St. Vincent & Grenadines

You were driving home in the dark on one glass-slippered heel, window sliced open and bathing in the snowliquor of the night air. We heard you singing, and couldn't bear to wake you.

12 November 2005

Those flowers bloom where you have placed them.

This is sort of related to what I posted yesterday.

I take part in a reader-response feature at the Press Democrat, the local daily, where they e-mail me questions from time to time and if I respond in time, they might publish me in the paper. Yesterday, they sent me this prompt:

Conservative talk-show host Bill O'Reilly has angered San Francisco by suggesting the city doesn't deserve military protection in case of a terrorist attack because it voted to oppose military recruitment in its public schools.

Do you think the city's voters have the right to discourage military recruitment when they benefit from federal protection?


This was my response:

The job of soldiers is to protect all Americans, not just the ones with whom they agree. In our military, service is not a quid pro quo arrangement — that's what distinguishes it from organized crime. Perhaps if we weren't squandering thousands of lives in an unnecessary, interminable war, the military wouldn't need to resort to selling itself to impressionable teenagers.


They chose not to print any of the responses because "the story did not develop as we anticipated", so they said. I don't know what that means, exactly. But I have a blog, so ...

2 Comments:

Blogger Jemaleddin said...

Interestingly, all those ads and all those recruitment efforts don't seem to help recruiting. There's an inverse relationship between the strength of the economy and the number of enlistees.

10:23 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have a whole slew of cousins who are just the right age for drafting. They are, almost every one of them, musical geniuses. I doubt that this administration has any place for musical genius. It doesn't promote profits or destruction to play music. I hope there's no draft.

8:05 PM  

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