Political Memes

Yep. I hate to say it, but the system is rigged to push people into serving.

I grew up in a relatively rural part of the south. Among the people I went to high school with, most of the ones who managed to get their lives in order by their 30's either:

• Came from money, or married into money.

• Had a degree, no student debt, and a nice VA loan to buy a house.

The idea that one can just work hard and opportunities will come is a myth. A lot of brilliant people I knew from high school deserved better than they were offered. I was at least able to go to college and suffer through the process of earning an advanced degree, and now at my age am just barely beginning to pick myself up out of literal decades of struggle. But there are amazing people I know who deserve that shitty overpriced piece of paper way more than I do, yet never even had the option.

But then when you hear that Kevin, the D student who used to sell weed beneath the bleachers, now has a degree, a good job, and a nice house because he enlisted and spent 4 years deployed in Korea just monitoring radio equipment...it's a bit demoralizing.

I'd like to say that my decision not to enlist at least puts me on some sort of moral high ground, but we're all basically complicit in the violence of capitalism at this point just by doing whatever we do that keeps the machine running. I never had to worry about the guilt of killing brown people in the desert, but my taxes still bought the guns.