I read this from advice columnist and frequent shitty person Amy Dickenson the other day. She almost never gives good advice, advising people to make bad choices and take subservient roles or compromise on things that have no business being the subject of compromise. I hate her advice but I belong to a snark community online dedicated to mocking her and other bad advice columnists from the internet and archives.
For those who don't want to read, the letter I am focusing on is the first one, which proclaims to be from a woman whose family served in the military, whose husbands and sons are all military, and who tragically lost a child to the military. Her daughter (of whom tehre is no mention of military service, incidentally) is dating a young doctor who, by the letter-writer's own admission, is respectful and nice and makes her happy. But she can't stand him because he didn't serve in the military. The letter-writer thinks he's 'entitled' and a bad person because he doesn't go to church and never joined any armed forces, because he's (the horror!) a plastic surgeon, and because he (????) drives a foreign car.
Look, lady, I'm sorry for your loss and shit but seriously--you need to go fucking die in a brick kiln for your attitude. Fuck you hard with a hammer. This is not fucking Communist North Korea. This is not the Vietnam War. This is not the fucking Roman Empire or Sparta. Military service is not and should never, ever be compulsory. You know what you get for forcing people to serve their country? People who really fucking hate their countries. You can't make people be patriotic and sacrifice their lives and their freedom--even in the event they never see combat, they lose their fucking freedom selling their souls to the fucking military--to their country. That becomes meaningless, for one; a country is best served by the people who want to serve it. Though my cynical brain makes me wonder how voluntary the service of the children actually was. People who come from military families tend not to actually realistically have very much of a choice in this area. There's almost never an explicitly-stated message of 'enlist or we disown you', but that tends to be the subtext.
Military service is fucking sacred and no one dares speak against it, but I'm going to. Not everybody who joins the military is an all-around hero. They're not automatically good people because of this. Even when they go off to fight and die. They are not always doing it for the purest of intentions. Sometimes they're really, really fucking atrocious individuals. Criminals exist in the ranks of the armed forces just as they exist everywhere else. Just as there are bad people who join the priesthood, or the medical profession, or become teachers, or police officers, or any other 'respected' authoritarian profession purely to gain access to people to victimize, there are people who join the military because they really, really fucking suck. They do it to kill people. Not everyone who wears a uniform is like this, obviously, and there are bad people in uniform who are bad in ways that have nothing to do with their reasons for joining the military. Charles Whitman was a marine--before he climbed the fucking clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and shot people.
Wearing a uniform doesn't make you a hero. And refusing to wear one doesn't make you a bad person.
What I really, really, really fucking hate that I've seen time and again in military families is this elitist prejudice against people who aren't military. Like no one is worth a shit until they sell their soul and stop being human for the motherfucking government. Go fuck yourselves. You all deserve to be slapped for thinking of this.
People who like the military have such a fucking hard-on for it. I've known military families from all branches, good and bad people. Most of them are not like this, but the ones who are tend to be really egregious offenders. When you think the military should be the be-all, end-all for everyone you really need to pull your head out of your ass. Not everyone is cut out for that shit. Not many people actually are. I, for one, would not last a week. I am emotionally unstable and extremely volatile and if you taught me how to handle a gun I would probably follow Charles Whitman right up to the clock tower and shoot people. I don't take orders. I odn't like answering to other people. I do it all to an extent because I have to but beyond what I consider reasonable accommodation, I refuse to do any of it. I would not be a stellar choice for anyone's military unless you decided to plant me with the enemy for the sole purpose of collapsing their entire system of government.
My grandfather was in the Air Force and is one of those guys with a major fucking hard-on for military service. He has pressured--really, seriously, intensely pressured with the threat of cutting off communication and disinheritance--every one of his grandchildren as they get older to join the military. None of us so far have been obvious first choices for military. I am not, my brother is a fat nerd who doesn't shower and can't be nice to anyone (actually that sounds pretty military to me), my cousin Ian is a very skinny computer nerd type and extremely timid. None of us are military types. We would not have ever done well. We all passed through high school and Grandpa pressured us all to join the military--some branch, any branch--ostensibly to 'help pay for college' but frankly the price is too high for any degree. For some reason he wants us all to be Marines. I don't know why.
Anyway: the answer has always been NO, but Grandpa doesn't listen to this. He talks about how awesome it would be for us to be in the military. He talks about the 'opportunities' (yeah, to get fucking killed). He talks about how good an experience it would be. (Know what else is an experience? Cancer. It's also an experience I hope I never have.) The answer has always been NO. I get that he just wants to make us do what he thinks is right but he needs to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. No means no. No means I do not want to join any branch of the military for any reason whatso ever and no circumstance conceivable, including gunpoint, would entice me to try it. The discussion should end there, but the discussion never ended there. We got literature in the mail, calls from recruiters, applications to unwanted places sent to us.
No.
Knock it the fuck off, Grandpa. Go away. Stop it. Cease and desist or I will switch your multivitamin for cyanide.
My next cousin is going to be a junior in high school and he's pressuring her. Join the military, military service, military, military, military!!!!!!!!!!! No. She is not military type either. She has said no. Still he bugs her.
This is not acceptable. Someone says no, that is the end of everything.
If you want to join the armed forces or something, go ahead. Have at it. Totally your choice. That's what the freedom you rub your tiny little peen with comes from--people who choose to serve because they want to and they defend those freedoms. When you take freedom out of the equation it becomes meaningless. I understand wanting to recommend something you love to people you love--like sharing a good movie or a book or music. But when they don't like it, you stop pushing it.
And that is especially applicable with things as life-changing as a decision to enter military service.
I don't know whether or not the initial letter-writer was simply writing out of grief and anger at her son's death (guilt, perhaps?), or whether she wrote it because she genuinely believes that those who serve are inherently more valuable than those who don't. I sincerely hope she gets the help she clearly needs because this is not an attitude that should continue. She's so worried about how 'future grandchildren' might receive a 'message' from this--but what message is she so scared they'll get? That it's okay to be different and follow your dreams? OH, wait, that's right, military shitbags don't like people who are different. Somehow I don't think she'll have to worry--if there are grandkids and she keeps that attitude, I suspect she won't be invited to spend too terribly much time with them in the end.
Get over yourselves. Stop insisting everyone needs to be a military personnel to be a human being. They don't. You know what you are? A terrible little entitled fuckhead.
Not all military families are like that. Most aren't. But, as I said, when things go bad there... they go really bad.
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