Organizing Notes

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....

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The collapsing US military & economic empire is making Washington & NATO even more dangerous. US could not beat the Taliban but thinks it can take on China-Russia-Iran...a sign of psychopathology for sure. We must all do more to help stop this western corporate arrogance that puts the future generations lives in despair. @BruceKGagnon

Monday, September 13, 2010

BRAINWASHING THE KIDS FOR ENDLESS WAR

With unemployment growing across the nation local school systems are increasingly turning to the Pentagon for support and funding. This means an increase in the Junior ROTC programs in middle and high schools.

Global Network board member Bob Anderson (a Vietnam vet) from Albuquerque, New Mexico sent me a message this morning saying:

Recently I followed a link off an Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) web page for more JROTC information, each school has a separate JROTC web page.

I wanted to see what the kids are seeing when the JROTC gets to them. One of the things our kids can sign up for is a web blog called Military.com. I signed up for it and want to urge you to also (just open one of the links below and click on the sub button at the top).

Major Barker, who is an employ at APS earns over $107,000 running the JROTC program that he says gives APS students leadership and citizenship training. I think if you subscribe to military.com and look at the types of things they are putting before children you will be horrified. This is as near smut porno as one can get and we taxpayers are footing the bill for this. I am outraged.

The videos at this site are the ones that Bob refers to that are now linked to the public school web page. Can there be any doubt that young people are being given the message - "This is all you can be." They are basically being told that your future will be endless war. This is normal. This is your future. Violence is fun and patriotic.

The rich kids will still go to Yale and Harvard and a few exceptional working class kids will get a scholarship to those schools as well. But the majority of American working class and poor youth are now being funneled into the military to fight the wars for control of the declining resources around the world.

We must talk more about this military infiltration of our public schools and resist it in our local communities. Call if what it is - teaching our kids to be killers.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Diane Lowery said...

No time to follow-up on this. I'm busy fighting to get my homeschooled daughter into the FFA chapter at the local public high school. We pay state and federal taxes but are locked out of the state AgriScience demonstration competition at the state fair this year because: (a) She is not an FFA member (b)She won last year (c)Public schools are designed to indoctrinate and frustrate those who do not conform
(d) All of the above

9/13/10, 12:46 PM  
Anonymous Brother Jonah said...

Since not everybody, indeed most people, don't have the money for Private Schools for their kids, or work so hard and long on their Minimum Wage jobs that they don't have time to Home School.
They send their kids, such as hey, MYSELF, to public schools.
Where often the children elect to refuse to take advantage of the resources offered to them, the library for instance, people who went to school themselves and applied themselves so they could pursue a not-very high paying job teaching others.

And just muddle through life. Others, well, we didn't refuse the gift of 12 years of subsidized tuition. We learned to read books. Things like "Hitler Speaks", conversations he had with his physician.

Where he said that the masses only need such education to make them efficient coolies for (our) industries and trainable conscripts for (our) Wars.

Destroying public education hurts the poor, it's a simple equation. Especially as the people who are Anti-Public Education are Anti-Workers, Anti-Union, Anti-Peace and ultimately, in my not very humble opinion, Anti Christ. Which isn't the same thing as Anti-Christian by a long shot.
And Anti-American to the point they'll decide who is or is not a Real American and punish those in the "is not" category. Leaving it to the Military to educate such of us who aren't Rich Elitists and therefore unable to attain a Private or Home School education seems like a "good" compromise.

But there's still, you know, lurking in the poorest quarters of America, future Heretics and Non-Conformists who will use any rung of any ladder to haul ourselves out of the Slave Camps. Including any training the Slave Masters felt would make us Docile Servants.

Ask how I know.

9/14/10, 2:46 PM  
Anonymous Brother Jonah said...

Meanwhile, "our" leaders, elected and otherwise, feel it meet to sell our children to the military as the only viable solution.

Something more of a better compromise, perhaps, would be to cut out the War equation. The richest might not feel vulnerable, but those who oppose their machinations, not all are going to be peaceable about it. Judging from history, probably not even a majority. Some who are on the "All well and good, BUT.." edges of the Peace Movement will be kicked into the Violence Movement once they realize the War-enriched "upper class" have sold their souls along with their own, and driven by a desperate fear that the Rich will win without a violent revolution.
The ones who are intelligent AND conscientious, the ones who would make leaders worthy of listening to, they'll be targeted by those who are Intelligent and NOT conscientious.

It's the way of the Violence Movement, either organized by the current crop of Rich Bastard Dictatorship, or whoever replaces them violently. There will be those conscripted either through the Rigged-in-favor-of-Wealth lottery system or by the equally rigged "All Volunteer" economic draft.
They'll have essential skills drilled into them for Violence. And reason enough to believe that it's their only choice and only chance.

As it stands now, there's a hope that Public Education can have, if not the officially sanctioned position, at least a quietly discussed back-door leading to Non-Violent philosophy.

How long after Public Schools are targeted for closure, until Public Libraries are also targeted? Or the Internet declared Private Property and closed to dissenting thought?

Look around, they're all three in the same stage of Privatized Rot.

9/15/10, 1:54 AM  

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