the military begins recruiting ‘soldiers’ before they grow out of their booster seat
four year olds have toy guns and green army men
by grade school you’ve memorized the star spangled banner and the pledge of allegiance
in middle school you’re old enough to play first person shooters set in war times. you and your friends brag about how many kills you have, what guns are your favorite
in high school, rotc comes to visit. you get letters in the mail detailing scholarship and housing opportunities you could have
and if you’re poor or unsure of your future or in love with the idea of ‘protecting your country’ like the men in call of duty
every branch of the military has a sponsored blog on here because they want everyone 13 and up to know that soldiers are heroes and they should join them
To those of you who were wondering, this is a very US-specific post. What gets done to you guys is terrifying, and it’s really unfair.
Ah yes I remember how the different military branches visited my high school at multiple times throughout the year and set up their little pull up bars and had little competitions and the strong little ones got lanyards so the recruiters could pick them out
I dont even know if you’re joking or not
We’re not
We’re really not. What’s super terrifying, that I learned in my kinetic imaging major, is that our military actually hires game designers to design video games promoting our military, and markets them to kids as young as ten or twelve. Our government made friggin reality TV shows out of taking high schoolers and teaching them about the “awesome shit” that they could do for the military. We watched one of the episodes in my Critical Media class, and it made me so physically ill that I actually had to leave the classroom and heave over the toilet while sobbing my eyes out.
This level of propaganda can and does lead to violence even amongst said children. Ask any Puerto Rican child that’s ever refused to say the “pledge of allegiance” (that’s the real name for what most kids are asked to recite every day before school starts) what happens to them exclusively via the other children who consider this blasphemy.
I took the ASVAB (an intelligence test that the military uses to see which branch you would do best in) as a joke in 10th grade to see who would score higher, myself or my boyfriend. He scored a 91, I scored a 93. The next thing I knew, I had recruiters calling my house and visiting my school. I was pulled out of class to talk to recruiters who came to my school specifically to see me. One recruiter from the Marines showed up at my house after school. When I told him that my mother wasn’t home and I wouldn’t allow him inside he tried to push open the door and said “That’s okay, she doesn’t have to be here for us to talk.” I had to tell him numerous times that I would not talk to anyone without my mother present. Then he sat in his car and waited for her to come home. Keep in mind that I am an overweight female and these recruiters were still trying to get me to sign. They were talking about special diets and training programs that would get me in shape in time for my 18th birthday so I could join. It was ridiculous. My mom said that she had never seen anything like it, and she had scored a 92 during college when she had taken it. (Then again, she had joined the Air Force almost immediately after taking the test, because that was her dream.) Shit is scary.
Oh god yes this brings back memories. I took the ASVAB on a lark to skip classes. I scored a 92 and my GOD the effort they put in to try and recruit me… This was pre 9/11 when I did it, but afterwards (post 9/11) they got WORSE. They told me whatever I wanted to do for a career they could help me but they were so PUSHY they freaked me out. I hid whenever I saw the recruiting staff on campus
I started getting a recruiter contacting me when I was 26 goddamn years old, while married to a PTSD’d out twice deployed vet.
Eventually I responded to an email with “I’m fat, asthmatic and married to a human y’all ruined so leave me the fuck alone” and he did.
At the same time he started sending my then husband letters about how they were going to call him back to service if he didn’t re-up in the National Guard (who also get deployed to the Middle East), which is actually a lie. nevertheless, my ex was terrified he’d get brought back in and burned all the letters so there’d be no record of him receiving them.
Turns out that recruiter won a bunch of awards in the state for his recruitment statistics. Interesting ways he went about it, huh?
the marines kept calling my house and mailing things to me and my little sister (who is 12) trying to get us to sign up and my mom finally had to talk on the phone to the dude and tell him that i was a chronically ill trans kid and i would not nor would i ever be joining the us military and they finally quit calling
ive also been singled out and yelled at by multiple teachers in school for refusing to stand and say the pledge of allegiance over the years, told things like i was disrespectful and was a traitor to my country and whatnot. its especially bad and military-centric in the south (i currently live in NC). If you dont live in the us, look up the words to the pledge of allegiance. its vaguely reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, and they start children saying it every day from age 5. how many 5 year olds know what they are saying and agreeing to? none of them, thats how many.
My high school required us to take the asvab. For two years afterwards I received near daily calls from the air force.
jeez. i went to school in ny and had a really liberal teacher in 5th grade who would drop little comments about discrimination against illegal immigrants, maybe we shouldn’t say “God” in the pledge, etc. and if he hadn’t made those comments i wouldn’t have thought twice about these things even though i wasn’t religious and was reciting a pledge involving “God” every day. by hs, everyone just stood and listened to the pledge without reciting it, and we never had crazy military recruitment. did get the west point letters in the mail though
I went to school in NY too and that’s where I took the ASVAB my senior year of high school and got letters from all the branches because I did so well. Specifically, the Air Force Academy wanted me real bad lol. You get the stuff about the military all the time in school. But I was an Army brat so I got it double you know?
At both New York Comic Cons I’ve been to, the Armed Forces have a big booth set up with a bunch of video games that Con-goers can try out – and a recruiter conveniently sitting right there in case anyone wants to sign up.
In my after-school class, one of my students is now an official recruit and has already missed class twice to attend his army events.
I got several calls from the Marines when I was in High School. It was like they were boys trying to ask me put on a date, just chatting with me about myself and what I was interested in. Thankfully I still had my deathly fear of intimacy with men so I eventually emphasized my asthma to get them to leave me alone. But now in the cold light of 10 years later, that was some grooming shit. Making me feel like a special kid. Preying on a 16 year old girl. Fuck that.
This is fucking terrifying. No wonder conservative American governments are so furiously opposed to free/affordable college, housing and healthcare – if poor kids had access to all that stuff as a matter of routine, then what the fuck would the army have left to bribe them with?
I scored really high on the ASVAB tests to! They were REQUIRED in my school as a graduation standard! Without taking them, you weren’t allowed to get your diploma!
I ended up almost going into the Marine’s because I was in a really abusive home place, and the only reason I didn’t is because my birth defect showed up during a physical!
It’s really terrifying!
I go to a Montessori school so thankfully no recruiters ever go there, but all three times I’ve gone to a local high school for standardized testing there have been little sections asking if I’d like to learn more about the opprotunities available to me in the army. Plus, when I went to sign up for the PSAT I was given a whole magazine thing telling me about all the “great creative things!” I could do if I signed up. It was geared towards everyone from athletes to kids who liked photography and I remember being just kind of amused by it at the time, but looking back…it’s actually really creepy.
Here’s the thing, though. No space can be safe for everyone.
If Tumblr is safe for Nazis, it’s not safe for Jews. If Tumblr is safe for Nazis, it’s not safe for people of color. If Tumblr is safe for Nazis, it’s not safe for disabled people. If Tumblr is safe for Nazis, it’s not safe for queer people. If Tumblr is safe for Nazis, it’s not safe for Roma people.
I know who I stand with, and it’s not the Nazis.
Now it’s your job, @staff, to stand with us.Regards, Tumblr User Maud O. Bedlam
This should have all the notes.
@staff – get on the right side of history.
Dear @staff – here’s another pro-fascist blog you think we should be following.
“germany didn’t destroy auschwitz so we shouldn’t destroy confederate monuments” is a weird argument to make because auschwitz remains open to memorialize holocaust victims while providing education and maintaining tangible evidence of genocide, whereas american slave plantations remain open not as monuments to murdered and brutalized slaves but as luxury-destination wedding venues which promote themselves as providing “the romance of an Antebellum-style mansion, beautifully decorated and meticulously landscaped; the luxury of an all-inclusive venue, where extraordinary service and elegance are paramount, and nothing is sacrificed; the magic of having your dreams come true, while the vision you’ve had for your special day is perfectly executed.”
like, yes, germany preserves nazi history and america preserves confederate history, but one difference between the two is that germans don’t routinely shell out thousands of dollars to hold fairytale weddings on the graves of jews.
Excuse you all, german here! While the sentiment is very commendable and holds true for (death through work-) camps like Dachau, Sachsenhausen or Bergen-Belsen (and more) nowadays (do not think that in the late 1940 and 1950 ppl wanted to remember their crimes), you need to understand that the death camps were all ‘conveniently’ placed outside of mainland Germany and in the East (Treblinka, Sorbibor, Belzec, Kulmhof,
Maly Trostinez, Bronnaja Gora,
Majdanek and Auschwitz [which was a hybrid of a death camp and death through work camp]).
What I am saying is that Auschwitz is a POLISH museum. The POLISH parliament decided
in 1947 to make it one. So do not forget that it was the Polish people who made a memorial and educational place out of this. The very first memorial place was the KZ Majdanek in 1944 btw., which is also in Poland.
And keeping alive the memory of the murdered people by Germany and the Nazi ideology all over Europe is done by all affected Nations, because in the early 1940 you could find concentrations camps everywhere – even in North-Africa.
It’s not “just words” anymore. It never fucking was. These are literal nazis. Fascists. White supremacists. Antisemites. They’re dangerous. They’re violent. They’re fucking thriving and they have the police in their back pocket.
This is what antifa is against. This is what we want to stop. This is what this liberal nonsense about “hearing them out” enables. They don’t want to listen.
Whether we’re ready or not, this is the reality we’re facing.
We need to stand up for once and have some conviction towards protecting Jewish people, people of color, and all the other marginalized groups they intend to harm.
…is make a pale appeal to “unity” and a vague attempt at describing a wrong evenly divided among “all sides”.
now, i’m just a simple television writer, but i think we can all agree that condemning racism in the form of swastika-brandishing morons is not exactly an act of political suicide, even for the most craven and cynical. as a country we are all pretty much in agreement about the evils of the third reich and what it took to defeat them.
so what are we left to think of a president who can’t even bring himself speak ill of people actively working – in his name, while wearing his clothes, and shouting his words – to resurrect an evil that hundreds of thousands of america’s “greatest generation” gave their lives to destroy?
this is our country. this is our president. this is the biggest threat to our democracy. it isn’t immigrants. it isn’t gay marriage. it isn’t transgendered people in the armed forces. it isn’t minorities.
yeah so there’s a neo nazi/white supremacy rally going on in charlottesville where they are literally chanting “blood and soil!!” (an actual nazi saying) and the police are doing absolutely nothing about it. no tear gas, no national guard, no heavy police force,, these TERRORISTS are getting away with spreading hatred towards the marginalized and i am absolutely sickened
spread this like wildfire
Is that an actual picture of the event bc wtf that looks like half the campus
unfortunately yes, here are some more photos from the terrorist rally:
Wow what do ya know, it’s all white guys how shocking
A few women were there too.
For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.
We directly created the conditions that gave rise to ISIS. We created the Taliban and Al Quaeda before that. Our war profiteering and imperialism has done nothing but hurt civilians.
Yeah, ISIS is bad. Yeah, the others are too. But when we kill more civilians than insurgents WE ARE THE PROBLEM. There are no acceptable levels of civilian casualties.
THERE ARE NO ACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF CIVILIAN CASUALTIES.
And if you want to talk weakness and terrorism, let’s discuss the literal fucking Nazi that was protected by police weeks ago that just murdered two Americans in an act of terrorism targeting Muslim women. If you want to talk about heroism let’s discuss the young man I’m watching over in the hospital tonight–a scholar and a poet who nearly lost his life with the other two for daring to stand up against hate. A boy barely old enough to drink put his unarmed body in harms way to protect the innocent while cowards in armor invade foreign lands crying “freedom” and allowing “acceptable levels of civilian casualties” so our corporate overseers can make more money.
Shut the fuck up.
The War on Terrorism has now lasted more than fifteen years. How many people have been killed or maimed or dispossessed, how much money has been spent, and what exactly do we have to show for it? Is the Middle East more peaceful or stable now? No. Are there fewer terrorists? No. Are you any safer now than you were in 2001? No. All that it’s done is ruin millions of people’s lives, militarise our societies, and create a power vacuum to be filled by an organization so bloodthirsty that even al-qaeda seems disgusted by them. And we’re just supposed to continue this until trumpets sound on doomsday? Fuck off.
The Doctor Is Out 