Seriously, America, is there anything you won’t ask illegal immigrants to do?
I have this song on my iPod; the chorus goes, “You’ve already put big old tears in my eyes. Must you throw dirt in my face?”
We’ll let undocumented workers scrub our toilets, clean our houses, raise our kids, plant our fields, harvest our food, butcher our meat, build our highrises, and FIGHT IN OUR WARS, but we don’t think they’re good enough to be U.S. citizens?
We’re trying to send undocumented kids to FIGHT IN OUR WARS.
I about fell over. If you get kicked by a random brown person today, America, this is probably why.
Tiny Cat Pants 
this is another of those things i suppose i’m too much of a foreigner to understand, that you americans are willing to allow non-citizens to serve in your armed forces at all.
the one army i’ve ever served in, i was in only very briefly and only due to conscription, and i didn’t like it much. it surely must have been very much different from an all-volunteer, professional force. but even so, even then, the notion of letting folks without citizenship join even that military would have boggled my mind. hello, it’s only one of the more important groups of people to the country’s security and existence, there.
and letting people who are not only not citizens, but in the country against its laws, take up arms for it… i think anybody born outside the u.s. might as well give up all hope of ever understanding that. you ‘merkins can be so damn weird at times.
Heh. That too, Nomen. But I think a big part of it is that the people we’re sending right now… those people we’re trying to get out there… they’re not really the professionals. They’re the cannon fodder. Sure, we’ll give them some training and maybe a gun or two (gee, wouldn’t body armor be nice? and maybe some mental health services?), but at that level, we just need bodies. And we’d rather have others die than our own.
you are the online Jon Stewart in a plaid apron
tiny cat pants
auntie B
how I missed you
re: the latest cannon fodder
when the ice caps slide south
and we all have to head for Mexico
to escape freezing to death
Then will we speak of what is humane and right?
If I am not mistaken the first or one of the first three (or something like that) to die in Iraq was a citizen of Guatemala … serving in the U.S. Army!
P.S. it is a big thing and it is not new. I’ve had several students who got on the fast track to naturalization by volunteering to serve in the armed forces before they even had green cards.
First, it’s an all volunteer military. Nobody is making them sign up.
Second, nobody is holding them prisoner. If they don’t like the deal they are getting, they are free to return to their homeland.
Ex, come on now. While it might not meet the definition of conscription…it sure parallels it. Besides, that wasn’t even the point of B’s post. Yes, it is an all-volunteer Army, but B was lamenting the fact that we ask these people to do so much, and serve in our own military because not enough of our own fair haired boys are enlisting and then treat them like shit.
no, it doesn’t parallel conscription; it’s worse than that.
conscription is more like, you’ve got citizenship with all its privileges already, so now that you’re legally adult (or just about, at least) your country wants you to fulfil one of the responsibilities that come with those privileges. shitty job but somebody’s gotta do it, and as a citizen you benefit from the job being done so chip in, yada yada. it’s tit-for-tat and you already got your tat.
this is more like wage slavery of the worst kind. want any rights at all in society, any hopes of ever being even a second-class citizen? bleed for us, and bleed first. if you survive, maybe we’ll treat you halfway decent — maybe. sounds more like extortion than a civic duty. cheapens military service terribly, if you ask me.
exador’s seeing only the black-and-white of there being a possibility to opt in or out, or there not being such; he’s selectively ignoring any and all coercion that may be involved so long as it doesn’t rise to the monochrome level of lethal force, wear-the-uniform-or-die. that the “option” is no real, humane, livable option you can actually freely take or leave doesn’t seem to register in his mind.
the fact that military service, like citizenship itself, ought to be something more than a meal ticket and a way to get your official papers officially stamped hardly seems to register with anybody in america, it sometimes seems to me. servicemembers are either hero-worshipped as these people who selflessly sacrificed all these things for the greater good, or they’re treated like expendable dirt. sometimes both. that they might just be everyday citizens who did the duty of citizenship doesn’t seem like a common viewpoint.
Hear, hear. Whether you treat them as demigods or dirt, you are ignoring what you would not ignore if you regarded soldiers as everyday citizens just like yourself. You are not ignoring that they sign a contract to offer their lives up for whatever our government (of, by, and for the people; remember?) decides to do with them. What you are ignoring is that there is another party to that contract, one which must not be allowed off the hook for its part of the bargain. We (through our government) owe those soldiers all the health care they need until they die, even if that includes mental health care for the shit they dealt with in the combat/occupation zone. More than that, though, we owe it to them to make sure our representatives aren’t sending them into needless and poorly planned hostile adventures.
As much as I consider myself anti-war and anti-military-industrial complex, it really disgusts me to see politicians and pundits hiding behind the hallowed skirts of soldiers as they push their various agendas (at least until the soldiers start speaking out, then the soldiers become dirt again).
Church Sec, what enraged me was all this furor over the MoveOn ad, when I clearly remembered the Right’s abuse of John Kerry and Max Cleland. It seems that the sacredness of serving no longer applies when you are the political opponent.
And hell yes there is another party to that contract, and one that has repeatedly failed to live up to it’s agreements. We are about to get a whole bunch of guys back here that are by rights fucked up, and what do you want to bet they get zilch with respect to medical/mental treatment?
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