Can you see your way clear?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Can you see your way clear?

The VVAF poll found that only 43 percent of draft-age Americans would be willing to comply if the draft were reinstated. Perhaps even more surprising, it found that fewer than half the parents surveyed would want their child to serve. The ruling argument is, and always has been, service to country. But that was when more Americans saw the decisions of their leaders as serving their country, too, not as self-serving.

Besides, if young people are meant to think that military service is noble, recent events have certainly disabused them of that notion. Of course there are soldiers who have served in Iraq with valor and dedication. But the photographs of Americans at Abu Ghraib Prison hardly make a uniform look like a worthy aspiration; instead they look as though they were taken during pledge night in the Sadist House at Dirtbag U. And the attempts by opponents to dirty up the military service of Sen. John Kerry are a valuable lesson to any sentient kid. Somehow the truth can be spun so that a decorated Vietnam veteran who chose to enlist and serve can be made to seem less heroic than a guy who used family connections to avoid combat. Not only do you go to war; when you come home, others denigrate your service, finding you insufficiently maimed.

Who could blame this generation of young Americans if they demurred when the Selective Service came knocking? Even some of those who entered the military under their own steam and enlisted are now claiming conscientious-objector status--and being granted it--because they cannot see their way clear to supporting the war in Iraq. During the Vietnam years, 170,000 of those called up were granted CO status, 40,000 left the country and some went to jail because they believed the war was illegitimate and immoral. But even then, in the thick of the protest years, the average American was more idealistic about the nation and its aims than today. If my brothers had been drafted, my father, a Korean War vet, would have sadly sent them off to basic training. Today he'd buy his grandkids a one-way ticket to Toronto.