Way to miss the point, Berkeley!

Okay, if you know me personally, you know that I'm about as anti-war as one can be. If I had my way, our top-of-the-line all-volunteer military would only go into combat as a last resort. It sickens me when politicians who've never gone near a military base except for a photo op use our military as yet another re-election strategy.

But again, if you know me, you know I'm far from anti-military. My step-dad is a decorated Vietnam veteran; two of my grandfathers served in World War II, and I've had family in almost every branch of the armed forces at one point or another. I have the deepest, most profound respect for any person who volunteers to give up control over his or her life to the extent that military personnel do. Not to mention the whole possible-loss-of-life thing.

I don't have a problem reconciling my pacifist tree-huggerness with my respect for the service. Maybe it seems like a contradiction to some people, but not for me. The way I see it, I believe utterly in the freedoms listed in the Constitution, and the military helps protect those freedoms. Simple.

So this pisses me off on a number of levels. Apparently, the good citizens of Berkeley, Calif., don't have the intellectual capacity to balance disapproval of President Bush's war with the necessity of a standing military. That, and I just generally hate it when fellow liberals do crazy sh*t that makes us all look like idiots. Geez, Berkeley - what, are you on John McCain's retainer?

So the city of Berkeley doesn't want Marine recruiters anywhere in town. When they first kicked Marines off the campus of UC Berkeley a few years ago, at least there was a plausible argument. Not a very strong one, granted...But the campus of a school, even a public one, is still kind of a legal grey area. But a whole city? How is that even legal? It reminds me of the old "sundown towns" back in the Jim Crow era. Those weren't kosher, either.

Leaving aside the legality issue...WTF are they thinking??? If you ask me the Feds are perfectly justified in threatening to revoke their funds if the city actually manages to ban the Marines from existence. Why should Berkeley benefit from the protection of the U.S. Government (in all its forms, from bucks to bombs) if the city won't contribute to that protection? It goes back to the basic philosophy of fiduciary trust - all citizens put into the pot, so to speak, in order to build a system that can help us do the things we couldn't do as individuals. Berkeley can't have its cake and eat it, too.

I wish these folks would grow up. I wish they'd climb off their shiny civil disobedience pedestals and get a little real-world dust on their Birkenstocks. I wish they'd learn that waving signs only goes so far, that if you really want to change the world, you organize voting precincts and make phone calls and write your Congressperson. I wish they'd see that the enemy is not that man or woman at the recruiting station, but the corporate-funded fat cat in D.C.

And I'll be honest - the devil on my shoulder wishes, just a little bit, that Berkeley would get hit by a massive natural disaster (no fatalities or anything; just a lot of smashed buildings and stuff), and that when the city council asks the National Guard for help, they're told, "Oh, but I thought we weren't welcome in your city...?" Yeah, I know that's awful, but the little devil on my shoulder doesn't really give a f*** right this minute...