Saturday, January 23, 2010

Military and Responsibility

I am rooming with a true Republican. She makes Reagan look like a liberal. She says that she will never, under any circumstance watch MILK the movie and she said she wouldn't support the petition against the bill in Uganda that would use the death penalty against anyone suspected of homosexuality. I might not make it through the semester.

The above 3 sentences above are a text message I sent to my sister and a couple of my friends. One of those friends is a guy at the Naval Academy. Let me tell you now, the educational system has FAILED my dear friend at the Academy. He replied that he did not understand, so I simply explained to him, "My roommate is an extreme conservative and I am not. There is tension." He replied, "I don't even know what those words mean." ...AH! No wonder America is in such a frightening state.

Someone who is in training to be in a leadership position in the military should know what is going on in politics and how it will affect the military and his job. I also believe that one in the military, especially in a higher position, should also be interested in politics enough that he or she would want to know why the government is pursuing specific policies and why/how it is using the military to execute its policies. To keep up with those developments is hard work though, so I can at least try to be sympathetic to someone who is not informed on those aforementioned topics, but to not even know the meaning of the terms conservative and liberal is just unacceptable. I am personally frightened to know that men at the Naval Academy can be so uneducated. I feel that the more uneducated military personnel are, the more dangerous -not protective- the military is to my own safety as an American citizen.


In my view, my friend is using the excuse of "Well they are orders. It's not my job to understand them. Only verify that they are ethical and moral and accomplish them," is an ignorant and lazy excuse. It is a cop out. You have a moral responsibility to understand why you are doing something and how it affects all parties involved. The task of verifying if orders are "ethic and moral" is not easily done when one does not understand why they are being ordered or the context that they are being ordered in.

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