Operation Human Shield

I'm from a little town in Indiana -- Cambridge City. It's small, surrounded by farms and like, many small towns, it's pretty poor. While it's a perfectly charming place to grow up, when the youth hit 18, the ways of getting out of town just aren't there. But my town's military recruiter is perfectly willing to help young Cambridge-ites with that. \nThe recruiter in Cambridge City told a boy I know, "If you want to find the good soldiers, you go to the ghettos and the farm towns." The best kids to suck in, he said, are those who can't go to college. \nOuch. \nAside from the "they're not really going to give you golden ponies if you sign up for the Army" issue, and the fact that the recruiters are clearly targeting the economically disadvantaged, this is indicative of a larger issue. \nThey're getting desperate. \nWhat is this saying about the war in which we're currently embroiled? During World War II, people signed up. They had a wealth of people volunteering, and they were fighting for something we, as a country, believed in. There was honor in military service. That's not to say there isn't honor today, but if nobody wants to fight, it's saying something about the issue we're trying to attack. \nThere's been a bit of hysteria lately over the possibility of a draft, which both candidates addressed during the presidential debates. Both said, unequivocally, there will be no draft. They're just going to let military recruiters pester the bejeezus out of every student in America. \nIn April, the House of Representatives passed a bill that increases the penalties for colleges that bar military recruiters from their campuses. The bill strengthens the Solomon Amendment, which allows the secretary of defense to deny funding to colleges and universities if they impede military recruitment or ROTC activity on their campuses.\nBut wait -- it gets worse. Buried inside the No Child Left Behind Act (maybe the dumbest unfunded ultimatum ever handed down) is a portion requiring all schools to accommodate and provide contact information to the military for every public high school student. \n"Each local educational agency receiving assistance under this act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students' names, addresses and telephone listings" (Sect. 9528).\nStudents can elect to have their information withheld, but that probably won't keep them unrecruited.\n"The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman," said Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York, in an article published by Mother Jones. "Or maybe if the kid died, we'll take them off our list."\nSome colleges are staving off the recruitment because of the military's stance on gays and lesbians, which the schools see as conflicting with their own anti-discrimination policies. IU doesn't have any formal arrangement with recruiters. And while anti-discrimination is definitely a great reason to keep the door closed, it's not the best reason -- military recruiters simply don't belong here. This is really second only to "Operation Human Shield" from the "South Park" movie. Remember when all the soldiers sent to the front lines just happened to be black? Well, in this war, they're poor instead. \nIf the country isn't behind the war enough to volunteer to fight in it, we might want to think about starting to think about re-evaluating the situation.