Two phenomena are confronting the post high-school youth of today’s United States. Outspoken and fashionably conservative students are rallying on college campuses – turning the tables on the so-called “Stalinist professors.” And military recruitment is facing significant decline as the War in Iraq drags on.
In the article, “Sensitivity and grit in the age of terror,” columnist Marty Andrade declared, “If the enemies of freedom are afraid of us, they are less likely to attack us.” The outspoken youth further notifies the United States that “with religious zealots, we need to be scary, intimidating and brutal.” Unfortunately for Andrade’s argument, a dwindling military force is not scary, intimidating or brutal. A military force swelling with patriotic Americans might be more effective than a Gitmo torture session.
Why are patriotic – and war-supporting – conservatives saturating college campuses?
As a former Daily Editorial Board member, I helped write the last anti-war editorial less than a week before the United States invaded Iraq. I took the anti-war stance based not on an absolute unwillingness to use violence but on a more realistic grasp of the situation than the irrational optimism – or the ugly deception – spouted by pro-war blowhards.
I wasn’t willing to fight the war either. If I must resort to violence, I must utterly believe in the cause. If it is difficult to see people you know head off to a war you do not support and are unwilling to fight, imagine how it must be to see people you know head off to war you fully support but are still unwilling to fight.
Toe-the-line College Republicans haven’t been too bold to give up their dreams of D.C. dominance to bolster the physical necessities of the very ideas they claim to represent. Is it not the right who declare talk is cheap without action? Unilateralism over the United Nations?
Recruitment declines while young conservatives – at precisely the right age for recruitment – inundate our universities, encouraging war and attacking the weakness of the academic left. Perhaps this is the best example yet of Andrade’s and other conservatives showing their “grit in the age of terror.”
Douglas Voigt is a former University student. Please send comments to [email protected].
