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Recruit, recruit, recruit
This morning I learned that the United States Air Force Band of Liberty ensemble, Afterburner, out of Hanscom AFB, visited the high school yesterday for an assembly program. Apparently they were pretty good and tried to appeal to the younger set, fairly successfully.
However, during the program, Air Force personnel circulated through the student body passing out recruiting material, along with pens and hats and lanyards and coffee mugs. Their recruiting table was set up by the door.
Now that irritates the living crap out of me. It’s not enough that the school is obligated to hand over the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the senior class to military recruiters and recruiters are parked in the lunch room on a near daily basis, but now this? A cultural music event with a little injection of red, white, and blue is okay, but dammit, quit with the intensive recruiting stuff. This drives me nuts. I don’t send my kid to school so the military can relentlessly recruit a captive audience on school time. I strenuously protest!!
Well, how else do you think the military is going to be able to handle getting more oil so the parents of the senior class can continue to drive their SUVs to the big box retailers to buy more stuff wrapped in oversized hard plastic containers?
;)
LOL! You have a point. But, I suspect those parents with the SUVs or the world’s smallest cars, wouldn’t mind at all if instead of the military trying to recruit our next generation so they could fight over the dwindling petroleum resources like dogs over a bone, we’d spend those war resources on educating their fine young minds to think us out of the petroleum hole we’ve dug ourselves into. Then we could continue having what we call an economy, be able to get places, and clean the earth’s air and water. All at the same time. What an astonishing idea! ;)
How strange that I happened to read your blog today when this issue is also on my mind. (I am an occasional reader of your blog....when I remember. 
)
This angers me greatly, especially since my youngest is a high school freshman. Tomorrow, I will quote and link to your blog from my site on this subject, if you don’t mind.
(I also wrote about this subject a few months ago at http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/ArmyHighSchool.htm.)
I don’t mind at all, Deborah
FWIW, the recruiting push wasn’t nearly as present or pronounced last year (or the two years prior to that) as it is this year, either. So it would appear that the little high school recruiting blurb in the No Child Left Behind Act isn’t uniformly practiced, from year to year. They are much hungrier for warm bodies this year, evidently.
You can opt your child out of the name release option built into the “NCLB”....but depending upon how your school district manages it, it might also keep his name out of college recruitment too. Our school district just split the two options...one opt out for military, one for colleges and whoever else might be interested (that’s scary isn’t it?).
Now that his graduation date has passed, we are getting regular recruiter calls for him...evenings and weekends included and getting his name off their lists is impossible.
It really sucks.