Spc. Marc A. Anderson's family buried him March 11th of last year in Bushnell National Cemetery in Tampa - aged thirty. He was one of eight Americans killed during Operation Anaconda. As a civilian, he was “a born teacher” in a Florida magnet school. He was also paying off student loans of $45,000 and barely keeping afloat on his salary. He enlisted in 1999 because an army recruiter told him the military would pay off his student loans.
Jessica Lynch of Palestine, West Virginia, now 19, joined the army in 2001, not as a career but as a way station, her friends and family said, a path to the college education that her family could not otherwise afford and, ultimately, to a job as a kindergarten teacher.
And the blame is not with our leaders, but with ourselves: we are the ones who let them get away with such an astonishing distortion of our true national interests. Military officers get free medical care, free professional training, free graduate study, housing allowances, free room and board if single, government-subsidized PXes, retirement after twenty years, and free burial at the end of it all. If we can’t even make it possible for a young person to become a teacher without going into crushing debt, we should come right out and admit that we don’t give a damn about our schools — not really, not in any useful sense.
If we think a nation with our geography and our wealth needs armies more than it needs schools — and on the evidence, we seem to think exactly that — then we are paranoid fools.
:m: Peace
Jessica Lynch of Palestine, West Virginia, now 19, joined the army in 2001, not as a career but as a way station, her friends and family said, a path to the college education that her family could not otherwise afford and, ultimately, to a job as a kindergarten teacher.
Now that she has been wounded, captured by Iraqi forces, and freed after five days by American forces, it turns out that she will be able to afford college after all:
My point here isn’t that Specialist Anderson and Private Lynch shouldn’t have joined the army. My point is that they shouldn’t have had to join the army to become or to remain teachers. The “education president” and the presidents before him and both political parties and both houses of congress should not have bequeathed us a country where the schools are starved and the Pentagon is stuffed like a Strasbourg goose.
And the blame is not with our leaders, but with ourselves: we are the ones who let them get away with such an astonishing distortion of our true national interests. Military officers get free medical care, free professional training, free graduate study, housing allowances, free room and board if single, government-subsidized PXes, retirement after twenty years, and free burial at the end of it all. If we can’t even make it possible for a young person to become a teacher without going into crushing debt, we should come right out and admit that we don’t give a damn about our schools — not really, not in any useful sense.
If we think a nation with our geography and our wealth needs armies more than it needs schools — and on the evidence, we seem to think exactly that — then we are paranoid fools.
:m: Peace
