When you're built like a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail...

Since the beginning of September, our campus has been echoing with the chants of the military. The freshman class has been undergoing their required month of Army training before starting classes, and they've been quite visible around campus - all dressed in camo fatigues, marching in formation from place to place, call and response yells in unison that I hear during the classes I teach, etc. etc.

One side effect of all of this bruhaha is to put me mildly on edge. Not the mass yelling so much, as the fear of walking past a squad of young boys sitting at ease who have all never seen a foreigner before. Having forty kids in green camo baseball caps and T-shirts all shouting "heh - loowe!" to me is the closest I've felt to being in seventh grade for quite some time.

Now, I'm all for a shared group bonding experience, and self-sacrifice and all, but you can get that singing Beethoven's Ninth, you know? Maybe it's being in another culture that makes it feel so strange. Indoctrination, I've noticed, is much more obvious when seen from outside rather than within.

Maybe it's the knowledge that there's a pretty good chance that the jet fighters that I see zooming over the campus whenever the sky is clear are doing practice runs to shoot down imaginary American planes. (Who are, in turn, over the Sea of Japan somewhere doing practice runs to shoot down imaginary Chinese planes...)

Another side effect, then, is the simple thought that, "Wow, there's a pretty large chunk of the world's infrastructure out there that's dedicated to killing people." Not directly killing people perhaps, but being there for that distinct possibility. Just sayin', y'know?

And just to be clear, I'm not singling out China here, or even the military in general. There are so many structures in place (think: energy, media, food distribution, and on and on..) that are based on protecting Our Group versus Their Group at whatever the costs, and most of us benefit from them to one degree or another.

From here, it seems so..., well, "sad" is not quite the word I want, though the word definitely fits.

More like, "Is this the best we can do?"

How...


unoriginal.