'Counter-recruiters' shadowing the military posted by Ben

Yahoo! News - 'Counter-recruiters' shadowing the military

Using a 1986 federal appeals court decision that supported the rights of draft registration opponents to equal access to students, the Los Angeles Unified School District teachers union has helped get counter-recruiting into some schools regularly visited by military recruiters in the nation's second largest public district.

I wonder what reach that decision has for the majority of counter-recruiters in today's political climate?

Eric Peters is an anti-war organizer in Chicago, where most public high schools have Junior ROTC programs. He says some administrators think counter-recruiters are unpatriotic, and others fear parental or public criticism. As a result, his group must distribute fliers off school grounds.

Yup. Not much.

Nevertheless, that people are out there working on countering the army recruiter spin is heartening.

Many years ago, when I was in high school, one of my favorite pastimes was to keep army recruiters talking to me for as long as they could manage. I would always be very polite, very interested, and would take great joy in throwing questions at them about military careers that they simply couldn't answer. One guy did try to promise me that I could be a film director if I enlisted, but even he didn't sound like he believed what he was saying. In any case, I took great pleasure in wasting hours of their time that otherwise might be used talking to kids who might believe them when they promised everything but the possibility of actually ending up in combat and being under orders to kill another person.

For me, this is the core issue: "Are you willing to kill another person when ordered to?"

If not, you don't belong in the military. If you are, I hope that your sense of the rightness of your superiors' cause is unwavering. But ultimately, no matter if you're on the front lines or sitting at a military computer workstation somewhere, your actions are supporting the ability of your superior to order down death on another. And when the top guy in charge in the vindictive, petty little man known as George W. Bush, what is the likelihood that you can rely on receiving orders to kill only when absolutely necessary?