Quote of the Day: Misdirected

Courtesy of the Star Tribune, Ken Plant of the army's Public Affairs office said the following in relation to some recent vandalism of a Minneapolis Army Recruiting office:

"It's misdirected frustration by people who are not too happy with the way things are going. The Army just goes where America tells it to go. If citizens want change, they need to talk about it."

I'd take issue with one aspect of this quote.

I agree with the premise that if people want change in "the way things are going" as one euphemism, the political process is where efforts are effectively spent. Clearly, throwing bricks through a window at an Army recruiting office doesn't really do much except cost the Pentagon a few hundred dollars to repair. These are folks who are misplacing--or at least, not accounting for--tens of millions of dollars. This won't hurt them.

Where I take issue is whether the statement of the brick throwers is necessarily all about the war. I don't know their mindset any more clearly than the Army spokesperson, but there is plenty of things to say about the Pentagon's recruitment strategies. Whether it's their practice of waivers to let just about anyone in (a full 11% of new recruits have convictions according to today's news reports); or the continued discrimination of gay people as they let people with gang tattoos in; or how they have virtually unfettered access to high school students' and their personal information; or how schools are forced to host them lest they loose their funding; or how many recruiting offices are staffed with professional sales people who have not seen combat and set rosy expectations of what their military career will entail; or, admittedly maybe closer to the point Mr. Plant made, because the offices are staffed by people making money off signing up people to commit themselves to fight in an unjust war and risk coming back themselves in a pine box; there may be more to it than simply being against the war.

I don't know. Maybe this person or persons are pissed off about the war, saw the Army recruiting office, and decided to express their opposition with some bricks. All I'm saying is that setting "the way things are going [in Iraq]" aside, there are plenty of other reasons to be dissatisfied with Army recruiting practices. I don't know how to change them, but my guess is that it isn't with bricks.

An afterthought: Can we waste the Pentagon's manpower and resources with a campaign to provide thousands of recruiting false leads? Call them up and be interested, string them along for a bit, then tell them to go to hell? I'm not going to do that because I don't want to talk to an Army recruiter about serving, but that would be at least more effective (and less legally risky) than throwing bricks.