by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
You see a lot of dumb hot takes on the Left about how people have been complaining about “effeminate” men and “masculine” women since dirt. And all of that is very true. And, yet, a part of me thinks that most of the social problems facing America would be solved by, I don’t know, bringing back the Draft.
Or, more specifically — unisex National Service.
This will never happen, of course, because the fucking GQP MAGA Republicans know that National Service would probably close the tap on ignorant, crazed young white men wanting to join their deranged movement. So if something like National Service ever happens, it’s going to be the Draft and it’s going to be because of either a civil war or WW3 or a combination of the two.
The reason why a Draft would fix a lot of America’s problems is one, it would force people from all over the country to have to deal with each other in the real world. It would give even the poorest white boy in West Virginia something akin to the college experience where they might have to bunk near a dude from New York City.
But also, it would force young people to face an existential choice in their late teens and early 20s. They would no longer have the luxury of worrying about their fucking pronouns, or safe spaces, or micro aggressions or whatever fucking dumb thing the “woke cancel culture mob” has come up with of late. The very real prospect of being cannon fodder would focus their minds on concrete things like getting married, having babies and just surviving long enough to get stuff like that.
Excuse me, I’m feeling old and crabby.
It just seems to me that a lot of the things that are so important to the “woke cancel culture mob,” the things that the Right harps on and what is so corrosive to the country as a whole will no longer be important when we either become an autocracy or we have a civil war. When you’re struggling to survive on a day to day basis that does tend to focus the mind.
I thought maybe the pandemic would do the trick, but it wasn’t bad enough, it wasn’t apocalyptic enough. It was too easy for the two sides to spin the reality of the pandemic for their own crass, shorterm political needs. But if WW3 or a civil war happened, well, that would be a different matter altogether. I don’t want a civil war or WW3 to happen — obviously — but it sure would force fucking Leftists to pull their heads out of their smug asses.
