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Give youth a future, not uniforms. Support their (and our) right to life and health. When we send young people off to war we expose them to: Death and Physical Injury. War, after all, is about killing human beings.
Emotional Injury
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a crippling emotional disorder in which painful memories keep a person from functioning healthfully. It is as hard on loved ones as it is on the sufferer. PTSD affects everything in a person's life, from work to relationships, to physical health.
Chemical Poisoning
Our youth could come home with permanently damaged nervous systems. A Houston Chronicle article dated February 8, 2003, noted that Gulf War veterans "have provided troops now deploying to Iraq a valuable lesson at the expense of the veterans' own health: that even low-level exposure to biochemical weapons can damage the nervous system beyond repair." The symptoms include "dwindling motor control, balance problems, chronic fatigue, and the inability to concentrate." In 1991, the U.S. Army used its own enlisted men and women as guinea pigs in a horrifying human experiment known as the Persian Gulf War. Today, the health of military personnel is still not a concern. An army audit in October 2002 showed that 62 percent of gas masks and 90 percent of monitors used to detect harmful chemicals were defective.
Give youth (and all of us) a future. The "voluntary" military works by limiting the choices available to young people. The lack of job programs, dwindling K-12 education budgets, and the escalating cost of college guarantee a population of young people without viable choices other than the military. The military is a huge government job program for youth 17 to 26 years of age. It provides rigorous physical training and mental brainwashing. Starting this year under the "No Child Left Behind" Act, the federal government began requiring school districts to give the names, addresses and phone numbers of all high school seniors to the military (see "Uncle Sam Wants Student Lists and Schools Fret," New York Times, January 29, 2003). School districts that fail to comply will lose their federal aid. Military recruiters report that the law is working. This year they signed two and a half times as many seniors with much less effort. Private schools, of course, are exempt from the new law.
The new recruitment policy is not only a violation of constitutional rights of young people and their parents, it is also a way to insure an army of poor people. The resources that support the military-a program of state-sponsored gang violence-could be used to create public works, job training, and higher education programs. With money saved from cutting the military budget we could provide free college education to our young people. This is a reality in countries like Cuba and Sweden, who have far less resources than the United States.
Wouldn't it be nice to know that young people were getting in great physical shape to withstand the long hours and heavy lifting involved in building affordable housing, cleaning up our rivers and lakes, and building safe bike routes? Wouldn't it be exciting if they were sharing their wisdom while acting as mentors for preschool and school-age children?
Wouldn't it be great if they were using their brains-not to memorize the orders of military officers, but to learn the critical-thinking skills needed to attack the global problems created by earlier generations? Wouldn't it be grand if instead of collecting the names of high school students eligible for the military, our government collected information about the educational needs of young people so the phrase "no child left behind" could become a living reality?
Instead, U.S. youth are getting in great physical shape so they are prepared to kill and die as part of the war machine. Those who survive but suffer physical and emotional injury will be counting on our failing healthcare system to put them together again.
As people devoted to peace, we need to speak up for a society that addresses the needs of its young people. Next time someone asks you why you don't care about "our troops" tell them that you do support the 200,000 young people in U.S. uniforms in the deserts of the Persian Gulf region. You want them home, out of harm's way, going to school, and working in meaningful jobs that sustain them and our society.
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