One of our most basic and most powerful Rights is the Right to Peacefully Assemble. Your physical presence at events where the military is using smoke and mirrors to distort perception of just what it means to join the military in a time of War is a crippling neutralizer to their misguided efforts. Music festivals, theme parks, race tracks, and football games are just some of the places where the military branches are attempting to associate themselves with something other than failing occupations and the loss of young promising lives. More and more, citizens are exercising their Rights to be present at these functions to present their argument. And it is making a big impact.
A giant traveling video game exhibit that serves as an Army recruiting tool will bypass this year’s Cleveland National Air Show after it was targeted for protests in 2008. The 19,500-square-foot attraction called Virtual Army Experience allows kids as young as 13 to play soldier.
Three times a week, 48 weeks a year, a four-man team drives a huge yellow Hummer to a different location. It might be a college or high school campus, a major fraternity gathering, an NAACP event, MTV's Spring Break, or BET's Spring Bling: If lots of African-American teens will be there, the Hummer wants to be there, too.
Not that racecars have anything to do with the military to begin with- but the dollars spent in Motorsports to cloud young peoples’ perception of the Army/Navy/Air Force/ Marines/ National Guard lifestyle really miss the mark, at your expense.
College campuses, high school Recruiters, and mobile marketing saturation with minority audiences- Inner cities, border towns, and first generation Americans get the pitch.
"Look around," the drill sergeant said. "In a few years, or even a few months, several of you will be dead. Some of you will be severely wounded or so badly mutilated that your own mother can’t stand the sight of you. And for the real unlucky ones, you will come home so emotionally disfigured that you wish you had died over there."
It was Week 7 of basic training… eighteen years old and I was preparing myself to die.
