Where has our collective conscience gone?
College for me started in 1967 at a Liberal Arts and Teacher’s college in Patterson, New Jersey. There were no sit-ins, protesting of recruitment programs(the military didn’t want us anyway). There were no controversial military research activities on campus. These aspects of campus life, had we had them, would have forced us to examine ourselves, and our school, and say something, individually or collectively, about what we wanted to be and what we thought the mission of higher education should be.
Most of us merely wanted to be teachers. Our school was a small, quiet environment in which personal growth and self examination were facilitated. Protests were held in Washington D.C. and many of us attended.
I do not now, after all these years, see sizable groups of people challenging the school administrations that support controversial policies that potentially have enormous impact on students’ subsequent lives and our conduct the world. Perhaps this is because we do not, at present, have a military draft.
But the question of how conscription came into being in a country that traditionally values individual liberty is nowhere being discussed; surprising in that our recent experiences in Iraq persuade me, at least, that the draft will be back in time for our next significant military engagement.
And the horrors that we have recently purpetrated or merely watched, unmoved, uninvolved, would have led to social outcry even in our little corner of academia.
We have become self absorbed to a frighteningly barbaric degree.
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