No draft can be constructed fairly

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, October 16, 2007

You’ve all gotten some mail at one time or another that you didn’t like. Those of you who are lucky have never gotten anything worse than the bill from the dentist, or maybe a fuel bill just after those prices went nuts and it was double what you expected.

Without a doubt, a letter from a lawyer informing you that your neighbor-cousin-stranger was suing you because your dog pooped on his begonias isn’t pleasant. No notification of a lawsuit ever is.

Perhaps almost worst of all is the one from your ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s lawyer informing you that they will meet you in divorce court to iron out the kinks in a contested settlement. Now that’s not fun.

The worst one I ever got started with: “Your friends and neighbors have selected you…..”

There was some more blather and balderdash thrown in there that attempted to milk the mom-applepie-flag angle, but the kicker was the last sentence: “You are hereby ordered to report to Ft. Des Moines for induction into the armed services on such-and-such a date.”

Yowser! All those other letters? The ones you’ve gotten over the years that most folks consider the worst ever? They pale next to the one that just legally extracted you from the plans you had formed for your life and conscripted you into the U.S. Army and from there, almost guaranteed, to Vietnam.

It didn’t take long to find out that every National Guard and Army Reserve unit was filled to the brim with folks like me, who didn’t want to go “serve their friends and neighbors” in Vietnam.

Except they really weren’t folks like me; mostly, they were folks like George Bush, the “bright and shining” youth of that era, the ones whose daddies had lots of money and clout, and could get their kids into these units, even though they’d been full for years. One more? Your son, you say? Heck, what commandant worth his political salt couldn’t find room for just one more. And one more. And one more.

So just the other day, I read in the paper that someone—an ex-general, I think—said that we needed to reinstate the draft. Then a few days after that, some guy who had served in Vietnam said the same thing: Let’s bring back the draft.

My first thought was: This guy, a Vietnam vet, must have suffered brain trauma while he was over there. My second thought was: Just imagine how many other messy little wars our political leaders could get us into if they just had more soldiers. My third thought went back to the vet’s naïve belief in reinstating the draft, a moral waif adrift in this complex society.

In other words, he really thinks that the draft could be structured this time to be fair and equitable. That this time, it would democratically select everyone at age 18 1/2 years of age, regardless of health, wealth, race, religion, or color. So what if they’ve got a heart murmur. Pounding a typewriter is strenuous? So what if their parents are wealthy? What exactly does that change, really? They’ll all serve in this utopian draft.

Yeah, right. Once again, when the dust that even perfection accumulates after a while had settled, we hicks, spics, and niggers would be sent off once more on some bone-headed mission to some hot, wet, dry, hostile climate, 10,000 miles away from home, to die.

It couldn’t happen again, you say? We could legislate it fairly so everyone would be treated equally, you say? An example of what our political leaders would do to that likelihood exists even today in our federal tax code, which starts out simply enough: If you earn 18,000.00 dollars or less, you owe 18 percent; eighteen grand to around eighty thou., you owe 24 percent. Anything above that, you owe 37 percent.

I might have those categories skewed a bit, I know I do, but you get the picture. How much simpler can this be? Three categories, three tax rates, right? Then how come the Federal Tax Code takes 1800 pages to cover all the exemptions?

And that’s why no draft could possibly be constructed fairly

We do not live in a simple democracy. We live in a democratic plutocracy, where wealth votes with money.

Here’s an idea, straight from the civil war: You don’t want your son to serve? Then you pay someone to take his place. We’ll start the bidding at $100,000.

Hmmmmm. Am I too old to go?

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.