Lot of people on here seem to assume that the US military is basically as bad as US police when it comes to “being totally dominated by frothing MAGA freaks.”
This is absolutely NOT the case.
people forget that the military specifically targets poor kids for recruitment, using benefits/stability as a big draw, and therefore you have a lot of people in the military who would not otherwise choose to be there
and of course there are people who will moralize that decision by saying that folks don’t have a right to live comfortably through that route, but I just also don’t believe that folks born into situations they cannot control should be forced to suffer to ensure their morality remains pure
a somewhat cursed but true statement is that the us armed forces, especially in peacetime, are one of the greatest elevators to the middle class for the poor and minorities
i've had a very charming conversation with a neighbor about how much he enjoyed living in Germany and seeing the world. his father was a sharecropper and he owns his own home
My time in the military exposed me to a ton of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, etc. My 80 man bootcamp platoon had more people of color than my entire high school. That experience played a fundamental part of my politics today.
There is a nonzero number of kids in every single basic training cycle who have simply NEVER SPOKEN to a Black, Latino/a, white, non-Christian, etc. person. It's insane. Like, every rotation you get someone saying "Huh, I thought Those People were all [insert horrible, often hilarious, stereotype]."
some of the most thoughtful people I’ve met are veterans from those areas who had to confront that upbringing in the military and ended up very left wing as a result
When I was in basic training, most of the other kids with me were not politically aware at all. The few that were swung to the left. Once I was done, there was a lot of heavy recruitment of the same kids by religious orgs like the Mormons, and those people virtually always ended up on the right.
Most Mormons end up in the State Department and other security services. NSA, DHS, CIA are majority Mormon.
They're all VERY patriotic, and because they're all Mormon, they all vouch for each other during security interviews/investigations.
My dad -- who first served in the segregated Amy Air Force -- made that point to me many times when I was growing up
"When the air crew keeping your plane from falling apart at 30000 feet is Black you quickly find that racism is a luxury you can;t afford," or words to that effect
sometimes! sometimes white people go rancid and come out of the Army about half a degree of separation from the Aryan Nation! DEFINITELY NOT SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE HERE
it’s absolutely true! while my mom sucks for other reasons, joining the military allowed her to leave a creepy older husband when she was 19 (her parents had gone back to Okinawa right after she graduated high school and she had no other support, financial or otherwise)
