The National Guard must be mortified. Excerpts from the recruitment pitch read as if they’ll be joining Doctors without Borders or some other humanitarian group that saves the world:
TAKE A PATH WITH PURPOSE. BE PART OF SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF.
This is a message to anyone who ever believed they could be something great when they grew up. It’s an invitation to all who want to build a better world. As a Guard Soldier you’ll respond when disaster strikes at home. You’ll also answer the call when your country needs you around the world. (www.nationalguard.com)
The $20,000 signing bonus must appeal too. As Helen Thorpe reveals in her splendid book Soldier Girls, it draws desperately poor young people, eager for education, who are then amazed when they wind up killing civilians in Afghanistan.
Or enmeshed in the current fiasco: saving the country from babies, and mothers who respect the U.S. so much they’ve walked long, treacherous distances to get here. Yet Jeff Sessions, Attorney General accuses them of “a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system.” What kind of system can’t absorb 200 unarmed civilians? An editorial by Eugene Robinson (Bay Area News Group, 5/2/18) adds, “President Trump has spoken of these people as if they were some kind of rampaging horde.”
So one-year olds, barely walking, can lug howitzers and machine guns all the way from Honduras? And their parents, facing death threats at home, want to undermine the only place they might find safety and hope for the future? Doesn’t the country face more of a threat from lax, NRA-friendly gun laws that have led to murders in our schools? Or a president who accepted $30 million in campaign contributions from said NRA, but doesn’t know asylum or international law?
Those laws were passed after World War II when the US disgracefully refused entry to German Jews, sentencing many to death in concentration camps. Does a Spanish-speaking Anne Frank wait agonizing today in Tijuana? And what’s happened to the ancient moral code that a society is judged by its treatment of the most vulnerable?
Kathy Coffey 