You’re not wrong, but I don’t think that’s really hitting the reality of what’s going through those people’s heads. Like, no 18 year old is sitting down and crunching a pros and cons list of a ticket to school vs committing war crimes to help distract the world from the fact that their president raped children on some sketchy-ass island.

There are a lot of reasons someone might decide to join the military… and some of them are legit just psychopaths who get off at the thought of killing someone, but those aren’t the ones my previous message is directed at. Those are a lost cause, fuck em.

But propaganda is a hell of a drug, and you gotta consider the environment these kids grew up in: in the time took between their mom squeezing them out, and walking out of that hospital front entrance, lil baby John Doe has probably already been hauled passed at least a couple of posters with some soulless “thank you for your service” shit. From literal day one, we’re inundated with propaganda touting people in the military as ‘heroes’ selflessly devoting their lives to serving their community.

As John Doe grows up, he’s made aware of some of the more horrific shit the military involves, but even that is tied into the whole altruism schtick: yeah you’ll need to kill people - but they’re the bad guys! Yeah you might get injured or killed - but who else is going to defend your family??

So John Doe is nearing adulthood - he’s developed a sincere sense of patriotism and has been conditioned to believe that the best way to act on it is by joining the military. So he does.

Fast forward a couple years, John has been paying more attention to things like global politics; that brain of his is about finished developing, and he’s noticing some increasingly grating incompatibilities with his world view vs what he’s actually seeing with his own eyes.

He sees the news from back home, and it’s the same shit the rest of us are seeing: people are being disappeared by unnamed police agents, families literally torn from eachothers’ arms, people just straight up shot in broad daylight. Human rights are walked back on a daily basis, corruption and malice in office are so rampant that it’s become difficult to even distinguish real news from cartoonishly overt parody.

So now we’re back to my original comment here - I’m addressing the Johns. The ones who joined for all the right reasons, only to realize after the fact that they are in fact the baddies. But that’s the thing, John, you swore an oath to defend us from all threats, foreign and domestic: why do you think it specifies ‘and domestic’? The amount of damage someone can do to our country from a position of high office would be (and has been) catastrophically worse than any threat even the most hardcore stereotype of a jihadist with an AK could possibly pose to our country. Your chain of command, all the way up to the president himself, has violated their oath - but you don’t have to. This isn’t why you joined, but you’re uniquely suited to actually do something about it, so stop following that domestic enemy’s orders, and actually do something about it.

Anyway, sorry for the long tangent, but the point is there are potential allies within the military. Even if that’s a minority of the military, the number is higher than zero, and it only needs to be one. Belittling John for making a shit decision (and it is a shit decision) to enlist isn’t going to accomplish anything; acknowledging the sense of conflict growing in John and encouraging him to make it right despite the atrocities of his chain of command… well, it doesn’t hurt to try. Hasn’t worked yet, and at this point I don’t exactly have high hopes, but the military’s a big group, and we just need a single one of them to finally take their oath seriously.