The world of fluffy things doesn't exist

The San Francisco School Board has voted to discontinue its Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program, much to the dismay of the nearly 1,600 students who participate in the program across the district. When the decision was announced at the board meeting, the hundreds of students that rallied outside in protest were devastated; many wept and hid their faces.

"We don't want the military ruining our civilian institutions," said Sandra Schwartz of the American Friends Service Committee, an active anti-JROTC program. "In a healthy democracy ... you contain the military. You must contain the military."

Wrong. In a healthy democracy you give students the freedom to choose to participate in JROTC and whatever other school function they want. You do not take away that choice because of your far left political agenda.

What the San Francisco School Board has done is punish the hundreds of students who participate in JROTC as an extracurricular activity instead of the myriad of other things they could be doing [HTML_REMOVED] like using illegal drugs or involving themselves with gangs [HTML_REMOVED] for its own partisan purposes.

"This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe," said JROTC instructor Robert Powell. "You're going to take that away from them?"

"[The JROTC is] basically a branding program, or a recruiting program for the military," said Dan Kelly, who helped lead the fight to dismantle the program.

The truth is that most students leave the program by their senior year and do not join the military after graduation. But even if every kid who participated in JROTC joined the military right out of high school, so what? What is wrong with joining the military? Citizens should not be scorned or ridiculed for deciding to join the military.

Let's think about this for a minute. I could say the obvious clich[HTML_REMOVED] [HTML_REMOVED] that we have the freedoms we do because of our military; we would not be a nation without it; we are protected from violence by it [HTML_REMOVED] and so on and so forth. Instead, I'll pose a rhetorical question: Does the San Francisco School Board really want the military to disappear?

Nancy Mancias, a former teacher, defended the dismantling of the program by saying, "We need to teach a curriculum of peace." To say such a thing suggests that the military is bad because its soldiers use force, and the military itself should, optimally, be dismantled.

Do I really have to spell out the ramifications of such an act? Do we really want to live in a nation that has no armed force and no defense whatsoever from the myriad of nations and powers out there who do not hold the same Western sensibilities of democracy and freedom that we do?

It is great to be opposed to violence. But this is the real world, and in the real world we have to deal with real people who really hate us and really want to destroy our nation. This is a fact of life that has always been and will never change. It is because of this fact of life that we must have a military.

I don't like the fact that we must have a military. I'd love to live in the world of lollipops and fluffy things, where there is no such thing as violence. But we do not live in that world [HTML_REMOVED] it doesn't exist [HTML_REMOVED] and it does no good to be against violence if you don't have the sense to defend yourself from the violent.

We are all so obsessed with our own ideologies that we have failed to remember that we are all still one nation. If we let our differences control us to the point that we forget our similarities, we will be consumed by those who are united against us (and by the way, are violent).

But I'm sure the San Francisco School Board has thought long and hard about what to do in a world where there is no military, since they detest it so much. I bet they have a stockpile of smiley-face stickers and feather dusters, ready to be used in defense of our nation. We can tickle the bad guys to death.

Columnist Brandon M. Dennis: brandondennis@thedaily.washington.edu