Bigritchie
Recycles dryer sheets
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2007
- Messages
- 377
When I was at Monterey at the height of the Evil Empire portion of the Cold War, the Defense Language Institute students used to wear t-shirts proclaiming in big letters on the front "We're learning Russian..." and on the back in even bigger letters "... so you don't have to!"
Having said that, the U.S. military is one of the world's larger [-]thoughtless heartless soul-sucking money-wasting[/-] bureaucracies. Look at the paperwork required to obtain a military contract, and see how long your small business would survive with the military's "pay within 30 days unless we need 90 days but maybe longer sometimes".
Wal-Mart and Microsoft may be evil personified, but they don't get to use near as much fuel & ordnance. The Hawaiian island of Kaho'olawe was bombed literally to death for five decades and $500M later there's still no guarantee that all the ordnance has been found/removed. Plenty of Hawaiian religious & archeological sites have been trampled & burned in the name of combat training and many communities have had their water supplies poisoned and their land contaminated. (Pearl Harbor land is so saturated with 90 years of diesel fuel spills that after every heavy rain the harbor shines with the oily runoff.) Farmers & ranchers have lost livestock to military [-]"oopsies"[/-] accidental weapons releases. Military exercises & maneuvers cause noise pollution, damage the roads & land, and inconvenience the communities that have grown up in the area.
Look at all the veterans & families who've suffered from military medical malpractice, pay problems, arbitrary enforcement of administrative requirements, and fickle civil-service changes. Then there's the whole fumbling dysfunctional military-media relationship.
I'm sure there are dozens of other issues I've overlooked that, collected into a crowd and handled with bad publicity, could cause a lot of people to become vociferously anti-military.
Hey Nords, that reminds me, I have watched a couple of things in the news about depleted Uranium poisoning on that island being pretty bad, have you read or heard anything locally about that?
Kinda made me sad hearing that was happening to paradise :-(