Imagine

CNN recently ran a special on the wounded service personnel returning from the war in Iraq. Specifically, they were focusing on the difficulties faced by the most seriously wounded in getting appropriate disability funds. For example, soldiers with traumatic brain injury were being told that their injuries were only serious enough to warrant small payouts, even though most of these soldiers will never be well enough to hold down full-time jobs. Given that many are in their early 20s, they face a lifetime of economic difficulty.

I wish there were no reason for a standing military, but I cannot foresee a future without one. Therefore, I think we are morally responsible for considering how such a military force should be staffed. It is all too easy to say this is a “voluntary” force, as though that fact somehow makes the system an egalitarian one.

The reality is that most of the enlisted personnel are from low-income backgrounds. They join the military because they see it as a way to escape an almost inevitable future of remaining low-income wage earners. Many pundits have noted that this war is unusual in that it seems much of the country continues on without any disruption, seemingly unaware of the details of the war. I cannot see how it could be otherwise; the movers and shakers don’t have to really think about the war because it is being fought, in a sense, by proxies, young people with uncertain futures rather than the sons and daughters of captains of industry.

If a draft had been established for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would have been out of those countries years ago. Middle and upper-class families would not have stood by as their children, full of promise, returned with life-changing injuries that would prevent them from seeking the lives they had longed for. But when we have stand-ins, it is all too easy to placate ourselves by saying these people want to serve, rather than admitting to ourselves that they needed to serve if they wanted to try and grab a slice of the middle-class pie.

If the billions of dollars being spent on this war effort were redirected to addressing the underlying issues of poverty, or redirected to paying educators adequate salaries so they didn’t have to choose between doing a job that could change the lives of poor children, and making enough to feed a family, or redirected to helping young people break out of the cycle of poverty, imagine how much could be accomplished. Imagine how many lives would be spared, lives of Americans as well as of Iraqis and Afghanis. Imagine how God would feel at seeing us treat all humans as persons of sacred worth.