We Are Just So Dumb

The Marines are opening infantry training to women.

We've gotten to the point where there is no telling anyone anything, you just have to shut up and let people be stupid and reap consequences (more about that later with respect to another topic; I'm writing about this not because it's deepest on my heart but because it's quickest to discharge what I have to say).

Either the standards will drop (which is what happened in the Army infantry) or in 10-15 years' time we will be telling sad tales of woe about how the Marines used women and have lawsuits against the government being  filed by female veterans whose joints have all broken down under the wear and tear. The female hip and knee joints were not engineered for this and are not going to weather it well. It takes no special wisdom to see that coming.

Leaving aside the mindless egalitarianism that insists equality is sameness, isn't this a further sign that we are fundamentally un-serious as a nation? We can't imagine we need to defend anything -- not really-- so we are fine with playing games with our armed forces. Nor do we recognize our enlisted men and women as that -- men and women, persons. If I had a buck for every time in the past decade I had heard or read someone saying, "Well, they volunteered," as if people's volunteer status obliterated humanity, absolving us from the duty to honor their sacrifice by not throwing their lives away lightly, I could send my kids to college. In a free nation with a volunteer army, when a person says, "I will live in crap conditions and sacrifice some of my freedom and lay my life on the line for you," that is a sacred trust and the nation says in return, "Thank you. I will never put you needlessly at risk."

This decision is like the internet meme "first-world problems." Some decisions you make only because you are wealthy and complacent and can -- and can't imagine things could ever be any different than they are.