A little while back, there was a debate in my LiveJournal regarding the draft and whether it was right or wrong. One of the aspects raised to me was that the majority of those serving in the military are the poor, and the draft would help equalize the social balance of this. It was at this that I walked away from the debate. I did so because anything said afterwards would have been taking things to a point of no return.

The truth of the matter is, no matter what kind of draft there is, there's always going to be more of the poor than the rich, and any mathematician will tell you that means far more poor kids are going to get drafted than rich kids. I listened to that mother in Flint Michigan talk about telling her children that the military was a good idea and nodded because, well, to the poor, it is. Why do you think I sat down with a recruiter when I was 18? Why do you think my brother's serving right now? Because it's a way out. Sometimes, it's the only way out.

Please don't lecture me on the inequality of opportunities available between the socio-economic classes of America. Nobody knows about it better than someone who has lived in a family that qualified at times as being under the national poverty rate what those options are, and for anyone who hasn't experienced that to try to justify forced military service to me on that level is hypocritical. I know quite well the decisions and conditions that motivate these kids to join the military, because I'm one of them. This what you need to understand about what I'm saying. I am not a political radical. I am not an anarchist. I am one of those kids that gets recruited. There are large parts of the state of New Hampshire that, once you get away from the picturesque tourist havens, look just like Flint, Michigan. I tell you right now that Michael Moore was telling you the truth because I am one of the people he was talking about.

That is not to say that I agree with Moore blindly. The part of the movie that I have to say I wasn't happy with was the portrayal of the Marine recruiters. Michael, I like you, and I appreciate the point you were trying to make in terms of who gets targeted, but the one thing you forgot to mention was that much like the soldiers fighting in Iraq, those recruiters are just doing their job. In Vietnam, the Army discovered that my dad could not only drive a boat, but was a strong swimmer. Therefore, he got to be the lucky bastard that placed explosives underwater at the base of bridges up and down the rivers. Did he like doing it? We've never gotten into it, but I'm thinking there were probably other things he'd rather have been doing at that juncture in his life experience. However, soldiers are told "We need to blow this up" and they do it. In Flint, those Marines were told, "We need to bring in a certain quota of recruits this month" and they do it. Because that's their job. They were going about it the best way they knew how. Recruiters are merciless because that's what they have to do to get their job done. They don't lie to you about the possibility of service when you sit down with them, and in some cases, they were a hell of a lot more honest about what a job would entail than a lot of corporate interviews that I've been on. To top it all off, those soldiers that you see walking around in dress uniform today recruit knowing that they could be right there risking their own lives with those they've brought in. For the most part, they are not asking you to do anything that they themselves aren't also going to have to do.

My brother graduated with a guy named P.J. P.J. was a decent kid from what I'd heard of him, and he spent a couple of months working as a recruiter in southern New Hampshire, going around talking to high schools in the area he'd graduated from. In some cases, P.J. spoke to kids he'd gone to classes with. Then, like many, P.J. got sent to train for deployment.

During training, P.J.'s Humvee flipped, and he was killed. Gone. Just like that. He died doing exactly what he'd recruited others to join him in - military service.

This, my friends, is the most important thing to remember. People are dying. It is a sad irony when an Iraqi woman and an American woman can stand in front of the White House and find an instantaneous bond in the fact that the actions of our government have caused them both to lose children, only to have a third woman walk up and tell these mothers that their sons' deaths were staged. It's wrong, and it's not what this country is supposedly based on.

Can we throw up our hands and drop out of Iraq? No, it's too far for that. The question now is how will the United States conduct itself to contain the ravages of Pandora's Box. This is what the election in 2004 will decide.

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