12/26/22

My Dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            How was your Christmas? I understand that you made some calls to the service people around the globe. I’m sure they appreciated your well wishes.

As I think about the 1.4 million people that we employ around the world to defend against enemies, foreign & domestic, I wonder if we couldn’t use our human capital in a more constructive manner. Do we really need to invest $732 billion into defense?

According to a 1/10/20 NYT article, “more and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties in the South… (leading military leaders to sound) the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not.” In that way our military sounds like the Burmese junta where soldiers & their families are cloistered & become willing to fire on their fellow citizens because they don’t feel connected to them. Dangerous!

Let’s invest in the hopeful endeavor of making the world a better place rather than the fearful enterprise of guarding against assault. Since service offers, “camaraderie, stability and generous health, education and retirement benefits” couldn’t we find other ways of providing that experience during citizens’ formative years?

Let’s do more to humanize the military by expanding the service to include teaching!!! Grow the City Year program of Americorps to make it commensurate with serving in the military. If you deploy a teaching force with the same kind of incentives that the Army offers, we might be able to solve our teaching shortages. It could be a win-win. A more diverse teaching corps, a service that is promoting the “general welfare” as much as it is providing for the “common defense,” a use of federal tax dollars that I could get behind. That would be amazing!

 BYBS,