Career Fair and Military Recruitment

The Pima College Career Fair will be held this Wednesday at the Tucson Convention Center. Among the list of employers who will be there are military recruiters. Arizona Air National Guard, Arizona Army National Guard, Davis-Monthan AFB, and U.S. Navy have signed up for a space to exhibit. According to a 3/24/05 Arizona Daily Star report, military recruiters missed their recruitment goals in March and April, so they are changing their sells pitch. They will be appealing to “patriotism and the value of service.”

Looking beyond the superficial media images of patriotic service in the war in Iraq that are found on network television to the images of disgusting torture, murder, and bombed out buildings that you can find on the Internet about the real situation in Iraq, it will be hard to convince intelligent youth with Internet access that the war in Iraq is for a good, humanitarian cause. Most aware people know for sure now that the reason for going to war in the first place, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is known for what it was, a presidential lie created through yellow journalism.

If recruiters appeal to students with the economic truth instead of with the lies of patriotism, they might find more ignorant and desperate youth willing to sign up. Appeal to them that they come from poor parents, they need jobs to support themselves and their families with their basic human needs, they have the pressure of paying back student, car, and credit card loans, that they are indeed wage slaves who can get a job killing for the military to keep the power-elite of Corporate America in power. Tell them that if they work for the military, they will get more money, benefits, and vacation time than working for McDonalds or Wal-mart. Their service to America is that they will be stealing oil in the Middle East from the natives in order for the rich, fat, greedy Americans to be able to drive around polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases in their Hummers and SUVs. These wealthy Americans escape from the masses who are need of universal education, sustainable housing, health care, and a clean ecology into their gated, walled-in, police-protected hollow mansions.

What is appalling about the military recruiters at the Community College Career Fair is that education is our hope for the future. As H.G. Wells said, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” When we have military recruiters seeking to find employees for their mercenary military at the Career Fair and no one raises their voices in protest, we live in a community of catastrophe. Education is failing to provide the youth with alternative visions and employment that really serves humankind wisely and compassionately. Education has become a handmaiden to Corporate Military America, a training camp for their dastardly deeds and imperialistic ambitions.

Education has lost it moral vision of creating a world without war and world where individuals are able to pursue jobs that make them free thinkers and happy individuals who are contributing to the common welfare of the planet. In order to be a force of the good, the beautiful, and the true, education needs a renewal in vision and values. It needs to incorporate new ideas into the curriculum such as the idea of matriotism defined as a movement beyond competition, war and patriotism, a reverence and loyalty towards Planet Earth. It needs to make the Earth Charter the purpose of education in every classroom. The charter, outlining our global need to create a sustainable future, was formed from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. At this critical point in history, national flags need to be removed from the halls of education and replaced by an evolutionary symbol that represents who we are, the Earth Flag. We need to pledge our allegiance to the Earth and all the Earth’s children who call us to equably distribute the wealth in environmentally smart ways.

We are an interdependent world that shares a global ecology. Such a reality makes nationalistic wars and militaries that are capable of causing a nuclear holocaust, unnecessary. I wore a button once that read, “What if they started a war and no one came?” This is exactly what our strategy as peace and humanitarian activist must be.

If you really want to serve your family, the family of wo/man, don’t sign up for military duty. Resist the seduction of the military recruiters and organize to take back the educational system from the corporate military establishment. But taking it back isn’t enough. We need to lovolutionarize (the evolution of revolution; a world-wide movement towards social justice) education, to make a society where the work we love to do for the betterment of ourselves and humanity, the creative, artistic and meaningful labor of love, the funding and support it needs to be a vital part of the global economy. Changing the national budget away from the military and towards creating a sustainable future could do this.

So raise your heads and your hearts out of the chains of economic slavery and tell the campus administrators what you think about recruiters on campus. Tell them what you think the role of education is for civilization. After all, isn’t education about evolving the world rather than destroying the world?