Now, add to these insults new injury from the old left. Last week in Washington, the Center for American Progress hosted what they called the Campus Progress National Student Conference. Bill Clinton was there. So was my former media colleague Paul Begala. Other attendees included former Clinton chief-of-staff John Podesta, Congressman Barney Frank and a handful of conservative students from the Campus Leadership Program and Young America's Foundation. One of them kindly brought me one of the "publications" handed out to participants -- an anti-military, anti-American screed entitled "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste: A Guide to the Demilitarization of America's Youth and Students."
The editors of this "enlightened" journal claim that the "glorification of the military ignores the fact that most positive change in the United States has come from people standing up to the government, big corporations, and other forms of organized violence and crime." It then offers tips on how to protest all things military.
The highly successful Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program is attacked in a spread entitled, "JROTC: What the Hell Is It? And, What Does It Want?" The conspiracy theorists who crafted the piece breathlessly suggest, "Young people in the hood are targeted because their lives are not valued by the U.S. Government."
Another article claims that "the $600+ billion the U.S. spends each year on maintaining a huge war-making machine cuts into the things that really matter to young people -- education, the environment, the arts. Our schools are thrown open to military recruiters while the money needed to buy books, maintain buildings, and pay teachers is dwindling."
In rhetoric reminiscent of the '60s, the authors claim that our military is "about sacrificing what makes us human for the powers of force and violence … We hold that the strength of a democracy comes from its free and democratic institutions, not its capacity for violence." Another piece blasts requirements in the "No Child Left Behind Act" that schools accepting federal education funding must allow military recruiters the same access they grant to business and college recruiters. The writer then cynically asks: "Could it be in the military's best interests to keep schools under-funded and keep college financial aid to a minimum?"
A piece extolling an anti-ROTC "sit-in" at the University of Puerto Rico includes praise for Iraqis who are "resisting occupation" and ends with a clarion call from the past: "We must fight the insanity of war from every angle. This requires ending all ROTC programs and their recruitment activities on our college campuses."
For those of us old enough to remember what it was like to come back from a war that we had won on the battlefield but lost on our college campuses and in the corridors of power, all of this sounds ominously familiar. Back in the '60s this kind of rhetoric helped to alienate America's citizen-soldiers from the citizens they served.
Current reenlistment rates indicate that those who are serving today -- and those who are volunteering to serve tomorrow -- still believe that this country is worth defending. Thankfully, in this war where every American is a terrorist target, there are still enough bright, tough, young Americans willing to stand up and fight.