Twisted psychiatric experiment? Exploiting students and veterans? Imperial brainwashing?

[lostnfound]

Or all three rolled into one?

I'd seen an email about it previously and thought it was nauseating -- but I thought it wasn't real, right?? Just some rightwing, maudlin and fake rallying theme, I supposed. Now I am shocked: it IS real, and it is apparently spreading. On one level, a simple experience, no big deal, but it carries the faint odor of a twisted experiment fit for a totalitarian military state -- not a celebration of democracy. In fact, I find it demeaning not only to the kids but to the soldiers themselves. They aren't carpenters, you know.

A friend of mine has a son in elementary school. He went to school one morning and all of the chairs were missing. The kids asked 'where are the chairs?' and they were told "you haven't earned that privilege yet." A few hours later, some soldiers enter the classroom, and the kids are called up one by one (are they standing at attention? I'm not sure..) to come retrieve their chairs. The soldier hands them their chair, and the kids are told that "this has been to illustrate that we have certain privileges because we live in this country that other countries that aren't free don't have; and it's because of our soldiers that you have these privileges." Then they watch a video about the military, they applaud the soldiers, and they are taken to the cafeteria where the soldiers serve them some refreshments.

How wrong is all of this, let me count the ways.
1. The soldiers who won "our freedoms" the first time around -- the revolutionaries -- weren't exactly "soldiers". They were revolutionaries fighting the government that was in charge at the time, the King of England. They were the rabble-rousers, the people who rose up to fight against the establishment and its standing army.

2. Soldiers ain't props. These soldiers may be called on to risk their lives and survive in terrifying places, but here they are being told (or at least encouraged) to participate in a cheap phony charade to brainwash a bunch of schoolkids.

3. If someone takes away your chair, kids, the lesson is to stand there submissively and wait for the authorities to give it back. The fighters in the American revolution would have demanded them back. The independent spirits of America would have gone out and chopped off some branches and lashed them together to make a chair. But in the dreamworld of the Bush military state, all good flows from the point of a gun. In the prison of a public school, the kids are powerless, and some distant schemer is playing power games or mind games (because you can be sure this wasn't just one teacher's idea).

4. The Army etc. employs a very large number of psychologists, some of whom are busy designing 'techniques' for 'interrogation', as we've recently learned. The others?...Nah. This was simply random acts of ..what...school superintendency?

It would be laughable if it weren't really happening. Is it happening at a school near you?