{"id":10748,"date":"2009-05-17T10:30:27","date_gmt":"2009-05-17T15:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=10748"},"modified":"2009-05-17T10:30:27","modified_gmt":"2009-05-17T15:30:27","slug":"john-grant-innocence-or-ignorance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=10748","title":{"rendered":"John Grant; innocence or ignorance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a call last night from someone who alerted me to a Philadelphia Enquirer opinion piece<\/a> written by Geezers for Sitting on Our Hands (Vets For Peace to some people) member John Grant who has made it his mission to shut down the Army Experience Center in Franklin Mills Mall outside of Philly. I wrote about their protest there<\/a> last week. Also, check out Skye, at Midnight Blue<\/a> who lifts a corner of the Philly anti-war refrigerator to shine a light on some of the cockroaches dwelling there.<\/p>\n

I waded through the drivel about the Army’s tax payer funded child abuse and the complaints that the staff of the AEC “soft sell” Army recruiting (imagine how much he’d complain if they “hard sold” it instead), but it was the last few lines that I really have to take issue with;<\/p>\n

The taxes that support the Army Experience Center come from a variety of Americans, many of whom – like me – are troubled by this means of recruiting young people. Society agrees that many of them are not developed enough even to drink a beer or drive a car.<\/p>\n

This is not an argument against defending ourselves, or against employing violence when it’s necessary. This is an argument for giving kids the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves. One thing we can do is instill in them a much more rich, complex, and cooperative view of human life on the planet – not the good-guys-blasting-bad-guys dichotomy drilled into them by the Army Experience Center.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First of all, it wasn’t society who raised the drinking age, it was the government. I’m pretty sure, if polled a vast majority of Americans would return the drinking age to a more reasonable 18 years of age and then just punish the people who violate the responsible civil behavior.<\/p>\n

Secondly, sometimes bad guys need blasting and the “rich, complex and cooperative view of human life” is abundantly provided in countless other mediums outside of the AEC. Now, if the AEC is living quarters for the sequestered youth of Philadelphia, Grant might have a point, but I’m pretty sure the teens who live in that area experience other things outside of the Army’s recruitment facility. And they’re not as dumb as Grant and the rest of the Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands think.<\/p>\n

Grant and his pals should be more concerned about the image of veterans that is being propagated in Pennsylvania by their own universities<\/a>, among other stereotypes taught in college. He should be concerned about a whole generation of veterans being smeared by their own government. But that task must seem daunting to Grant since he prefers to focus on a few video games at the Mall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got a call last night from someone who alerted me to a Philadelphia Enquirer opinion … John Grant; innocence or ignorance<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd","category-usual-suspects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}