[antimedia] antimedia: Perhaps there's hope for America after all....

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Posted by antimedia:
Perhaps there's hope for America after all....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1169612006.shtml


   ....if a Princeton professor thinks [1]we should talk.

     Those of us who have never served in the military usually don't
     know a lot about it. In 1975, when I arrived at Princeton, many
     older members of the faculty had served in World War II or the
     Korean war. Nowadays, by contrast, few members of the faculty have
     military experience--and those who do are likely to be Canadians or
     Israelis. Of course, some scholars study the military, past and
     present, but the base of direct knowledge that most of us have is
     not very deep--compared with what we know about, say, the federal
     government.
     I have tried to remedy my ignorance in the professor's age-old
     ways: reading and asking questions of knowledgeable colleagues,
     including a former Army officer and an Israeli former student.
     Whenever I can, I talk to my son and his friends. I have learned a
     little. I know, now, that when politicians speak of war as
     something that can be clean and simple, that won't demand terrible
     actions of those who fight and terrible suffering from civilians,
     they lie. But I'm still very ignorant, and most of my fellow
     professors know even less than I do. We who teach young men and
     women need to know more about what we ask some of them to do on our
     behalf and what it takes to do their jobs.
     It wouldn't hurt to ask how they and their commanders have done
     better than the university at some tasks that really matter for the
     United States. My son has taken a lot of orders from people of
     color--every color. The colonel who commanded the group with which
     he initially trained wore a size-24 flight suit when he met her,
     since she was pregnant with her third child. I can't be the only
     old white male professor who would like to see universities look
     more like the military, in these respects, than they do now.

   A rare breed, this professor, whose own son is serving in Iraq.

     It's time, and past time, to start more conversations: time for
     each of these institutions, and its inhabitants, to learn more
     about the other. Above all, it's time to find factual, substantive
     ways of talking about what the military can and can't do and about
     how it could be more effective and less destructive when it must
     wage war. Here in Princeton's bubble, where America's wars are
     never all that far away, it seems possible that we could do this.

   May his tribe increase.

References

   1. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070129&s=diarist012907