Conscientious Pantload

Apparently there is a small but growing contingent of deserters who have made it to the promised land of Toronto and Vancouver. Since this is, after all, a volunteer army, it is difficult to muster too much sympathy for what boils down to buyers' remorse. Still, there is a societal undercurrent informing the initial choice to join the service for many of these people.

Unlike the 50,000 Vietnam War draft evaders who came before them, today's war resisters aren't necessarily left-wing, college-educated and backed by a big peace movement.

They tend to be small-town America guys who volunteered for service, hoping the military would get them out of dead-end jobs and pay for the colleges and doctor visits their families could never afford.

Lawyers in Toronto and Vancouver have compared numbers and say they collectively have met with 200 Americans who have abandoned their units.

There are as many reasons to enlist as there are enlistees, I suppose, if you want to parse it finely enough. But it's not uncommon to hear about the kid who joins up simply because it's the best opportunity available at the time, because small-town America is dying on the vine, a wasteland of strip malls, Walmarts, and ignorant codgers constantly up in arms over those damned kids on their lawns.

Even the suburban/exurban paradises of the useless yuppie bobos are on the cusp of their own obsolescence, tethered as they are to a ever more unsustainable lifestyle. You think the price of gasoline is ever coming back down, you probably think David Brooks has balls, too.

And what are the economic options of these kids, in a country where their "leaders", who have voted themselves roughly $13/hour in raises in the last few years, cynically lawn-dart a proposal to raise the minimum wage to a whopping $7.25/hour by hanging the requisite "death tax" millstone on it. They can join the millions of families who get to eke their way through life while Paris Hilton gets another much-needed tax break, or they can take a chance and join the Army. Some choice.

So while I again harbor little sympathy for people who desert their team when they find out that armies, right or wrong, are sometimes expected to fight, I at least understand where some of them are coming from. They haven't been afforded the chances and opportunities lavished on the fortunate sons; Pierce Bush had to pick which college to drink himself stupid(er) for the next decade before inflicting himself on the political/business establishment like the rest of his useless tribe, while some grunt kid from Pacoima gets to choose between a life at Circuit City or whatever brass ring shines brightest at the right (or wrong) moment.

So I save the far greater measure of contempt for the legacy putzes who are too dumb to even know how lucky they've been. (Talk about your "unknown unknowns".) Most people do the best they can with what they've got and hope for the best, while smug, supercilious douchebags pontificate endlessly as if life and the world were just a big ol' game of Risk their mommy lets them play until the Slim Jims and Mountain Dew run out.