8 Reasons NOT To Join The Military, Tiem to argue Rating Options

[fameONE]

Military recruiters tour the country selling a dangerous product with glamorous ads, just like tobacco companies or drug pushers. The ads promise opportunity and adventure -- but don't believe the hype.

1. Joining the military is hazardous to your education.

The military isn't a generous financial aid institution, and it isn't concerned with helping you pay for school. Two-thirds of all recruits never get any college funding from the military. Only 15% graduated with a four-year degree.

What about going to school while you're in? Many GIs report that military life leaves them too busy and exhausted -- and doesn't really make time for them to go to class.

2. Joining the military is hazardous to your future.

Joining the military is a dead end. After you've spent a few years in the military, you're 2 to 5 times more likely to be homeless than your friends who never joined. And, according to the VA, you'll probably earn less too. The skills you learn in the military will be geared to military jobs, not civilian careers; when you come out, many employers will tell you to go back to school and get some real training. As former Secretary of Defense Cheney declared, "The reason to have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars...it's not a jobs program."

3. Joining the military is hazardous to people of color.

During the Gulf War, over 50 percent of front-line troops were people of color. Overall, over 30 percent of enlisted personnel but only 12 percent of officers are people of color, who are then disciplined and discharged under other than honorable conditions at a much higher rate than whites. When recent studies showed a slight dip in young African-Americans' (disproportionately high) interest in the military, the Pentagon reacted with a new ad campaign. They're targeting Latino youth with special Spanish-language ads. The recruiters' lethal result: tracking high achieving young people in communities of color into a dead-end, deadly occupation.

4. Joining the military is hazardous to women.

Sexual harassment and assault are a daily reality for the overwhelming majority of women in the armed forces. The VA's own figures show 90 percent of recent women veterans reporting harassment - a third of whom were raped. Despite the glossy brochures that advertise "opportunities for women," the military's inherent sexism is evident from sergeants shouting "girl!" at trainees who don't "measure up," to the intimidation of women who speak out about harassment and discrimination - not to mention military men's sexual abuse of civilian women in base communities.

5. Joining the military is hazardous to your civil rights.

If you aren't willing to give up your rights, the military isn't for you. Once you enlist, you become military property: you lose your right to come and go freely, you're ordered around 24 hours a day, and you can be punished by your command without trial or jury. Free speech rights are severely limited in the military. You can be punished for being honest about being lesbian, gay or bisexual. Worst of all even if you hate your job, you can't quit.

6. Joining the military is hazardous to your health.

The military can't guarantee you'll be alive at the end of your eight-year commitment: they can't even promise you won't be desperately ill from "mystery illnesses" like those of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. Whether it's atomic testing in the 1950s, Agent Orange during the war against Vietnam, or experimental vaccines and toxic weapons in the Persian Gulf, the military shamelessly destroys the health of its personnel -- and then does its best to downplay and ignore their suffering.

7. Joining the military is hazardous to the environment.

The US military is the single largest and worst polluter in the world, from toxins at bases to nuclear-tipped missiles to the destruction of ecosystems from South Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. And in today's military, the tanks and weapons are coated with depleted uranium from toxic nuclear waste!

8. Joining the military is hazardous to our lives.

The "adventure" in the commercials is code for war, the "discipline" code for violence. The military trains recruits to employ deadly force, yet recruiters rarely discuss the dehumanizing process of basic training, the psychological costs of killing, or the horrors of war.

The ads lie because the product is lethal -- not just to you, but to all of us.

For more information contact or write:

Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors:

630 20th Street #302,
Oakland, CA 94612
510-465-1617
Fax 510 465-2459

or

1515 Cherry Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19102
215-563-8787
Fax 215-567-2096

Argue.... I mean, debate.

[Turkish]

WOW, what a load of crap...


I'm sorry have you looked around at the world or the country your living in today? i spent 7 years living in downtown atlanta where car jackings, murder, home invasions, rape, robbery, etc etc etc were nightly occurrences. as a matter of fact i used to get up for work and watch the news in the morning for traffic reports and stopped because it was simply to depressing... every morning it was the same thing. thats just atlanta which really isnt that bad compared to other US cities.

talk about risk of death? visit some of our american highways, how many people die in car crashes everyday?! i mean people die from careless crap everyday... my dad was 6 months from retirement and fell off a golf cart and lost everything due to medical expenses now he is essentially homeless and all those years of paying into social security and taxes have given him nothing! the bottom line is sh!t happens and you cant let fear stand in your way of progression.

Sure the military may not be best suited for everyone or your local Harvard grad or the likes but look around, our economy sucks. people with multiple degrees are unemployed or having to seek employment at places like Wal-Mart but dont get me started on a place like Wal-Mart, i'll go on all night.

Not everyone that joins gets deployed to a war zone and if they do, there is a good chance they signed up for it. the military is like a mini-country, as one of the posters above pointed out you can do everything from being a Nuclear engineer to cutting peoples grass... its all in what YOU choose. Sure a person that joined with an ASVAB score of 35 can't be a doctor but lets face it, you dont have to be a genius to score high on the ASVAB, that person with a 35 would most likely be a drag on society or working a dead end job that he hates, at least the military provides some options for the future -- even that guy can choose to attend college while in the service (MANY PEOPLE DO) and advance his life even further.

the mother pointed out (i like a lot of her points) but one flaw in what she said or more, what she didnt say about the treatment one receives in boot camp. i'm sorry but the general population of the world are weak, both physically and mentally. the job of a drill instructor is to break you down in both respects and rebuild yo uthe way that the military needs you... a mentally tough survivor, somebody that doesn't give up, somebody that doesn't look for every excuse they can find to not succeed and i'm not saying that everyone in the civilian world is like this but look around and you will see it's more people than not and at the very least it keeps you in good shape, something that is becoming more and more rare every day.


the military if nothing else provides people with some very important lessons that will be carried for the rest of their life. as for watching a friend get blown away in a combat zone, is that really any worse than watching your mother decay of bad health because she can't get the medical treatment required due to the policies of insurance companies? i think not but my point is that bad things happen everyday and in most cases, you have no control over it.

Sure, you may get in the military and not be doing the job you want to do, maybe you thought it would be different than it really was, maybe you thought that job in communications was going to stick you in a nice air conditioned office but instead your sitting in a communications truck outside of a war zone with the only air condition being for the equipment and not for your comfort and to make matters worse(?) you dont have the option of quitting. well thats another important lesson for you, sometimes in life we are faced with difficult situations and in a lot of times we choose the easy way out, in this situation are taught and when i say taught, i mean ingrained into your character that just because you don't like a situation means you can quit or give up... instead you "solider" through it and finish the job... i've also heard this referred to as "manning up", something that seems to have been lost in today's society.

my point in all this spam is simple: the military isnt for everyone but those who choose to serve are in most cases a whole lot better off in the end. sure there are casualties but tell that to the mother who just lost her only son or daughter due to a stray bullet from a failed drive-by shooting... that wasn't a war zone, it was a residential area in the united states. or the husband that lost his wife or child in a car accident or car jacking... shit happens! i really hate to sound unsympathetic because my heart goes out to all those people but it does happen and happen everyday.in a lot of ways, civilian life isnt much safer than that of a military life... at the very least in the military your trained to deal with situations like this and your given a rifle and surrounded by people who also are trained to protect and serve (i dont mean the 5-O LOL).