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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (113806)	5/15/2005 8:06:53 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

Drug problems have virtually disappeared due to drug testing and zero tolerance. The services continued to let people in with drug waivers until about 2-3 years ago, and we've also wavered criminal records depending on the offense. The only difference I am suggesting is we encourage judges to help young kids find a different path. That avenue may save a life, provide the service with a great candidate, and remove a potential criminal kid on the wrong path from committing a crime against someone else. Let me say this as clearly as I can. I am not suggesting we lower the standards. Lowering the standards would happen if we went to a draft and forced a bunch of unmotivated kids in the service who didn't give a damn about whether they succeeded or not. A young kid, caught up in an inner city drug world who is removed from that element and given an opportunity to play within the military rules, or get booted to the slammer, is an entirely different motivational domain. A kid who gets drunk and wrecks his car while risking the lives of everyone else on the road is typically a kid who made a terrible mistake. What I am saying is in many of these cases kids simply made poor decisions, or were given poor role models, or had absent parents or a host of other small and large things. In these kind of cases we can find a path for them in the service if they truly want to travel down a different road. Locking them up for a few years without given them the opportunity to change is a far bigger cost to our society and a bigger risk. And blowing off their offense because our jails are too crowded without some form of punishment is also the wrong answer, because it allows them to continue on their destructive path where a teenager or young twenty something kid may turn into a life-long criminal. Besides, the option is always there if they fail out of boot-camp, or from one of the military schools (or anytime for that matter). Further, There are literally tens of thousands of people in the service today who came from that type of background or far worse. So the notion that we will be turning back to the 70's doesn't add up. You have said it yourself, the people we get in the military are a reflection of society, the difference is we don't accept the behavior society often accepts in order for them to engage in this world. The difference in the 70's was the services did accept it. Lastly, we have people who grew up in virtually every nation on earth in the service today, people who's past record is almost impossible to verify. Why should we accept a kid from the jungles of Nigeria, Benin, or elsewhere where their society never cared or tracked drug usage, and not some kid from America who got busted hanging around the school-yard trying to pick up girls or something?