STEALTH MILITARY RECRUITING

[I submitted the following letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Star today]

As American military recruiting quotas fall further behind prescribed targets (per your front-page article), and as the war in Iraq drags on, I look for our U.S. government to ratchet-up pressure on local high school students. With the help of our elected officials in Washington, the military is already using a stealth recruiting technique to turn the heads of our youth. I discovered this six months ago.

My just-turned 17-year old son started receiving a lot of military recruiting mail. Concerned that Ben Davis High School was giving the military access to my son's personal records, I began to ask questions. I discovered that BDHS had, in fact, opened my son’s school records to the military. Further, this open records access is required of the schools. The directive is part of the "No Child Left Behind" Act of Congress. Short of working to get the law changed, or short of the school district refusing the funds, there is apparently nothing an individual can do to stop it.

The only immediate option available for concerned parents is to request an "opt out" before their child’s 17th birthday. This "opt out" option prevents military sources from acquiring a child’s school records--including their address. To my knowledge, our school district--the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township--did not inform parents about this option. Now several slick military recruiting mailers arrive at our home each week. I intercept most of them (I'm building quite a stack of unopened military recruiting mailers--our tax dollars at work!), but not all. I do not know if it is now possible to stop the mailings.

"Poverty draft" describes what the military is engaged in--preying on kids with little money and few options after high school. Most of the slick recruiting mailers don't talk about going to war, just about opportunities to serve your community and country, get job skills, and money for education. They primarily target our neighbors with lower incomes. It is no accident that the median household income of the families of the majority of military recruits is considerably below the national average.

I don’t know what local educators think of this tactic imbedded in the “No Child Left Behind” Act. But it seems to me, of all professionals and institutions, educators should be ashamed of themselves if they idly go along with such policies. Are school administrators and boards of educations just cash-strapped hand-wringers, or people who act with integrity for the best possible futures for the students whom they say they are there to serve?

Military recruiting is nasty business. But its nastiness has been intensified and brought to a high school campus near you. Our federal government is sinking an unprecedented amount of tax dollars into military recruiting. More and more, our neighborhood 15-year olds see impressive, high-tech weaponry displayed on campus. They experience heavy-handed tactics by military recruiters at the local school. While we work peaceably each day, our nation's military--with the permission of the Congress and direction of the President we elected--is doing its dead-level best to get our in-school children to believe that the best option for their future--and the future of the nation--is a military one. Are you satisfied with this? I'm not.

Recently, I learned of an organization with an Internet site that let me register my protest against using the "No Child Left Behind" education act to open school records to military recruiters. It also helped me send a letter to our district's school superintendent requesting that the school withhold my children's names and personal information from military sources seeking to recruit them. The organization is Working Assets, the project is called "Leave My Child Alone," and the website is http://www.leavemychildalone.org/.

WAR & SACRIFICE: STANLEY HAUERWAS

"THE SACRIFICE OF OUR UNWILLINGNESS TO KILL." For now I will offer only a few bullet points I scribbled down during Stanley Hauerwas' presentation at the "Preemptive Peacemaking" workshop at Manchester College on Tuesday, June 7, 2005. Hauerwas, who teaches ethics at Duke, is considered America's foremost theologian by some (Time magazine, for one):

• "War is a habit of our imaginations."
  
• "War is an institution..." with a full set of self-serving and valor- and virtue-producing symbols, rituals, and rationales.
  
• "War is a sacrificial system."
  
• "War is seductive and powerful in its call to 'virtues...'"
  
• "The problem with peace is that is it is so damn boring..."
  
• "What we sacrifice in war is the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill."
  
• "The Christian alternative to war is worship."
  
• "The church is the alternative to war."
  
• "When we, as Christians, approve of or go to war, we rob the world of the witness of the alternative."
  
• "In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, war has been abolished."
  
• "You will have to watch the innocent suffer for your convictions...whether you are committed to Christian nonviolence or to just war..." The real question is when do we ever say "no" to the violence that perpetuates the future of violence-based innocent suffering?
  
• "The problem with most war memorials is that they invite lies." (Hauerwas considers the Vietnam War Memorial an exception to this.)

DESECRATING THE KORAN...AND OTHER SACRED THINGS

TURNS OUT NEWSWEEK WASN'T WRONG. After all the brow-beating Newsweek took by the White House for publishing an anonymously-sourced story on the desecration of the Koran by American military interrogators in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it turns out that Newsweek's story was based in reality. Reports range from Americans ripping out and wadding up pages and writing foul language in the Koran to urinating and stomping on it. Read the LA Times story here. The story is corroborated by now-released FBI files.

THE DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE. Even though Newsweek bowed to political pressure and retracted the story it published, other reports and investigations reveal widespread and intentional desecration of the Koran by U.S. interrogators, not just in Guantanamo, but in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under pressure from the International Red Cross organization--and in an effort to stop hunger strikes by Islamic prisoners who were protesting the abuses--the U.S. "officially" stopped the practice of abusing the Koran as a way of humiliating detainees suspected of acts of terrorism. But the damage has been done.

"ANYTHING GOES." Repercussions of this latest revelation of what American military and intelligence agents have gotten by with behind closed doors and out of the sight and hearing of a free press will likely reverberate throughout the world. Apparently anxious to get at information that would help our Commander-in-Chief reach his goals, aggressive interrogators have been singing "Anything Goes." Remember, the President has determined (under the advice of the man who is now our Attorney General) that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to these detainees. Rules and guidelines that would have prohibited the desecration of holy documents or restriction of religious rites have been set aside and disregarded.

HOW ABOUT HOLY PEOPLE? And it is most interesting to me that while many are justifiably concerned about the mistreatment of a holy book--whether it be the Koran or the Bible--we are not expressing justifiable concern about the mistreatment and abuse of holy people. It is a shame to abuse documents considered sacred; how much more a travesty to desecrate people--all of whom have been created in the image of God.

SANE AND HUMANE. If detainees have committed crimes against humanity, let the due process of civil justice prevail (and if interrogators have committed crimes against detainees, let the due process of civil justice prevail). It is the only sane and humane vehicle the civilized world has. But if we stoop to treat those whom we suspect of terrorism like animals, we have become the thing we hate. Have we crossed the line? Apparently some, representing the rest of us, have.