By Tim Redmond
Well, this is pretty fucked. I can’t reach school board member Norman Yee, but the Examiner says he supports bringing back JROTC.
That’s absolutely NOT what he told us when we endorsed him last fall.
Yee was the swing vote to end JROTC. The issue was phys ed credit, but the politics were clear: Voting to stop allowing kids to fulfill their gym requirement with JROTC would spell the end of the program. He did the right thing.
He later told us that if the issue were simply up or down on JROTC, he might have voted to save it, but it’s clear that the JROTC program fails to meet state standards for physical education.
But here’s the rub: Yee told us — told me, personally — that he wasn’t going to bring this issue back up again, that as far as he was concerned it was done. Technically, he hasn’t brought it up again — Jill Wynns and Rachel Norton did. (BTW, lots of people criticized us for not endorsing Norton. I hope you now see why we didn’t.) But if Yee votes to save the program, it will be a slap in the face to all the progressives who supported him.
JROTC, whatever its supporters say, is a military recruitment program. After our school board endorsements last fall, I got comments like this one:
No one’s forcing your kids to join the JROTC. But not having a JROTC forces other kids not to join. That’s wrong.
That’s what all the supposedly liberal people who say they support JROTC talk about: choice. Why not let the students who want to be recruited by the Army on a public high school campus have the right to do that?
And here’s what I — the parent of two public-school kids — have to say:
If I asked my kids if they’d rather have Pepsi or milk with their lunch, they’d say Pepsi in a second. My kids are still in elementary school, but most high school kids would say the same thing. The reason you take soda machines out of high schools is precisely so that kids DON’T have that choice. The reason you don’t let 15-year-olds buy alcohol is that society has decided they aren’t old enough to make that choice. Sometimes, you have to tell impressionable young people that certain things just aren’t good for them.
You can’t join the military until you’re 18. That’s because even the Pentagon has to accept that minors aren’t ready to make those sorts of life decisions. (If it were up to me, I’d raise the age to 25.) If military recruiters want to solicit young people and rope them into that culture before they have enough sense to think twice about what they’re signing on to, I sure as hell don’t want to make it easy. And I don’t want to let them do it in public schools.
Norman — This is madness. Don’t do it.