Up until a week ago women were excluded from the draft (as in Selective Service, just to avoid confusion. Sometimes I’m accused of being too much detailed but if I went to glib short statements people would bitch about that too so I’ll go with with being condemned for doing a good job rather than a poor one.) But there was a lawsuit, several in fact but the one in question was brought by women because it is discrimination. It’s all discrimination anyway because obviously personal wealth does count.

Get born into the “right” family like Bush or Cheney or other descendants of Dracula (True story) who make a lot of bread from other people dying, you ain’t gonna be drafted. It’s ludicrous to say otherwise but you know, some people do. I wrote this first for Anti-War which if you look to the right hand panel there are some excellent links. And I had an account –still do in fact… but I don’t remember my exact log in there which is a big problem always. But there’s an article written by a woman who had been in the Air Force and she is not amused. Rand Paul has one too, he jumps around between straight Green Party stuff to absolute Capitalist Libertarian. But I was trying to promote the premise as written by Jessica Pavoni titled Women and the Selective Service, two steps back for everyone.

So here I add my own experiences with the Draft. Yeah, I was SUPPOSED to register for it. And did not. It could have gotten ugly. It’s 37 years of Statute of Limitations but that doesn’t mean much to the Pigs. I mean, if I had the privilege of a family retainer (lawyer) it might but for all practical purposes, if you ain’t rich you can get slammed for anything.

Just ask John Walter’s ghost.

 I had gotten an Honorable Discharge from the USAF in 1979 for medical reasons. I’m autistic and the Air Force was the group who had diagnosed it, at Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland AFB… 12 years earlier. I wondered then at why they accepted my enlistment in the first place. You recall the incident of a fire at the National Archive in St Louis that destroyed the records of George W?

it’s not really a Republican myth. The crap about not being able to find his papers was, because the military keeps more than one set of records. The bit about the only thing you don’t need to turn in a dead one (light bulbs and toilet paper are the most commonly cited) and file a triplicate request form is a soldier or a grenade, that’s very close to the truth.

All that is a lead in to the main story, my dad’s Air Force records (Br and the next sequence is Bu, last names put his records in the same room as Georgie Boy’s) WERE resurrected. Just not in my pre-service background check.

I was happier than a hog in shit to get out when I did. With an honorable discharge. 2 months to the day prior to the Teheran US Embassy being taken.

Just everybody who was pending discharge had his-her discharge redlined.

It’s in the enlistment contract, as close to the actual Draft as you would get in 1979. They can keep you in the military as long as they want, “in National Emergency” which can be declared arbitrarily at any time.

Suddenly I’m required to register. Which I didn’t. And really, nobody actually checked. Starting January of 1981 Reagan-Bush were in office and busily appeasing the Ayatollahs and Mullahs because they got Reagan-Bush elected.

Stuff like engine parts for the formerly Royal Air Force of Iran were officially banned but they were still flying 20 years later. True story. The parts were made in Ft Worth Texas. So much for an actual embargo.

And the Iran Contra scandal which A Lot Of People Remember And Are Resurrecting because it’s a real campaign issue.

But a few years later I was a guest of the State and taking a course in Data Entry when somebody in Washing Tundy Sea sent me a nice letter informing me that I was not eligible for the taxpayer funded private corporate gift from the Social Security Administration to Ross Perot wherein the yankee gubmint would pay for my training with the eventual aim of me working for EDS. Which didn’t pan out for other reasons.

Because I had not registered. They were curious as to why did I not register, as I was an outstandingly patriotic citizen and of course they gave me a chance to hang my self with a noose made of government paper, a form explaining myself.

I sent it back saying I had an honorable discharge which really wasn’t a valid excuse and of course I already knew that. I mentioned in a truly snotty mode that I did not and do not actually owe them any further service. They sent me back an Oh Well paper saying that it was an oversight on my part and since by that time I was 27 I was no longer eligible to even register for the Draft so they forgave me.   Like I or anybody else needs forgiveness for not, as Brother Arlo said in his song “burning villages and killing women and children”

But that’s not the real story.

The real story is that old mean nasty ugly Draft Act in the first damn place.

The way it’s written even somebody categorized as 4F is still obligated to drop whatever the hell he (or she) was doing with his (or her) life in order to serve the Military Industrial Complex in whatever capacity the Military sees fit.

Any Breathing Living Body.

If for instance Steven Hawkings was deemed necessary strategically to use his talent and education in Very Higher Mathematics, perhaps to develop a super-bomb,  they could draft him. The curious exemption in all this, and for the longest time, was The Fairer Sex. I’ll go out on a limb here, make a really blanket statement, that most women were perfectly happy to have such an exemption.  And that’s a very good thing.The TRUE equality is if chickenshit chickenhawks like Bush or Cheney or Romney or Trump could not buy their way out of the Draft.

Of course that ain’t happening. So in a show of inclusiveness, the Pentagon is now accepting women as heavily armed slaves. Another peculiarity is that the Draft was initiated (in America at least, conscription is old as any historic warlords) was a war to end Slavery (in America… Most of the world had already accepted emancipation and the other holdouts like Siam and other Non-American backwater societies were not immediately affected)

Private ownership of human beings was officially outlawed (in America) but Public Ownership was officially initiated. The Military Industrial Complex or as anybody can truthfullly say The Corporate not so much Shadow Government was alive and well in America, So it still goes back to corporate private ownership of people.

Just, you know, not Officially.

Nobody really wins this current scenario.

“They” say that totalitarian (but they don’t call it that) conformity of thought word and deed is absolutely necessary to “win” a war. or even to have one. There’s a nursery rhyme type explanation of that, about how a loose horse-shoe nail caused a war to be lost. We learned it in school.

If soldiers and even civilians don’t follow orders without question, if we don’t believe absolutely in the Rightness Of The Noble Cause, well, y’all have heard the same things. It’s the stated reason for prosecuting draft resisters rather than draft dodgers.

Using nursery rhyme simplicity like the Horseshoe Nail analogy, well…

Nursery rhymes aren’t all that nice, are they? Think “Three Blind Mice” just for a really clean example… why would you mutilate blind animals by cutting off their tails with a carving knife? It’s a wonder kids don’t have more nightmares.

And war is worse than any nightmares. If you enlist or get drafted.