Old people, 1970 vs. 2018 (grandparent, alcohol, fighting, 11 year old)
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You worried about being drafted? I know a lot of guys your age and they weren't concerned. The draft ended at the beginning of 1973 when you were likely only 16. Even by then the number of soldiers going over was not that much. And worrying about being drafted at 11, a full 8 years before you would even be eligible, is kind of nuts. Not something anyone I know was concerned with at that age. Jay
I'm with the OP. Even *I*, who would have been about 9 or 10 at the time AND a girl, was constantly on the edge about the draft and the war. It wasn't JUST ourselves we were thinking of - it was friends, brothers, uncles, the relatives of our friends. Everybody knew someone who was MIA, KIA, drafted, joined, crippled mentally or physically, or run away to Canada.
Yeah, it WAS kind of nuts. But then WAR Is over the top nuts. And this was no WWII, with clear bad guys who were attacking other countries. It was a war to make the French happy because they didn't want to give up their colony and not get to abuse the locals there any more.
We lived in a very small rural town. I really didn't like it when Mom sent me downtown (a block away) to pick something up for her.
In several places on the sidewalk in front of the stores benches had been placed and on those benches sat old retired men. I'm realizing now that they were probably younger than I am now but they looked ancient - missing teeth, all crippled up. They chewed tobacco and spit brown gobs of it on the sidewalk. People in their sixties back in the Fifties truly did look old.
So they were a little scary to me and they nearly all carried canes. They weren't friendly old grandpa types but instead used to play a game they thought was funny and that was to try to trip us little kids with their canes as we walked by. Then they'd laugh and laugh.
Maybe it was a reflection of the times. Men didn't have much to say to women or children unless it involved household work.
I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt having to run the gauntlet in front of those old geezers.
Wow, that's bizarre! Our old guys hung out either at the post office or the barber shop. There were benches scattered around but they were OFF the walkways so even if we'd had a batch of grumpy old codgers like that, they couldn't have "got at" anybody walking by with their canes.
The grocery store was about a block and a half from the house. Starting about age 6 I started doing most of the grocery shopping with one of those 2 wheeled carts. I could fit 4 grocery bags in that, maybe 6 depending on how tall they were when packed. They don't make 'em like that any more.
I didn't have to run the codger gauntlet, but having some earth hole drive by in a car and yell something sexual at me - at 6!!! - as they drove past was not an unusual occurrence. Guys like this would also hang out at the park over by the YMCA. I don't think they were pedophiles, but any female was fair game for sexual harassment back then. Especially if you were doing anything the least bit unusual, and 6 year olds doing the family grocery shopping on foot were pretty unusual.
I can't remember old guys being mean to anybody. Just the earth holes who liked to yell sexual stuff at females regardless of their age, and they were all younger. Most of the old guys were actually pretty quiet. The other main place you could encounter them was at the diner in the back of the pharmacy.
Actually I miss those places. You could walk in and sit at the counter and get a real hamburger, fries, and a shake for like a buck or a buck and a quarter. 10 bits. The other day the cashier at a grocery store told me the total was $12 and 6 bits, and I handed over 12.75. The woman behind me was so impressed because she didn't know how much 6 bits was, LOL!
...and this was a common view held by 11 year olds in the late sixties? I'm genuinely curious.
It was a commonly held view by many young people. And many 11 year olds had older siblings who would espouse such ideas, plus it was all over the news and in the newspapers. Although I, personally, was only about 9 at the time. And yes, that was the view I had at the time. I could read. I could think. And that is what I saw, a war to support the white guys against the yellow guys, who they called gooks. When the side claiming to be "right" calls the guys who ACTUALLY LIVE THERE by racial slurs, and those folks DID NOT attack us first, there's a pretty good indication that maybe this was NOT a righteous war.
So yes, I imagine MANY pre-teens had such attitudes. We were barely boomers, but we were still boomers.
The "codger gauntlet." When I was growing up in our town of 5,000 there were only benches in one very small park around an old war monument. It was rare to see anyone sitting there. I and the other kids in my neighborhood had a worse gauntlet, one I would call the "Dash of Death." While we had a Main Street with grocery stores, there was a small neighborhood place on another street...unfortunately the route was through the back of a graveyard, shaded by large old trees and then through and empty lot.
We played in the rear of the graveyard during the day, it was one of our neighborhood play sites....but around sundown, when Mother said, "Oh darn, we're almost out of bread. Hurry up and get some at Smith's." Never mind "hurry up," I ran like sixty through that place....and then sweated as I trudged back through the field to get ready for the sprint back across the graveyard. The real terror came when she said, "I need a few things at Smith's." It meant you couldn't run like when you had just a loaf of bread squeezed against your chest. Milk was the most cursed burden because it came in glass bottles and if you broke it running, you might just as well have gotten sucked into a grave for what awaited you there: a good tongue-lashing, and a trip back through an even darker graveyard!
I grew up in the 40s, don't have any recollection of old men hanging around. As it was WW II I wonder if more of them were doing work that they would not have been doing if there had been no war. We had small factories that did directly supply the war effort and one I can think of would not have been onerous work. Strange, I remember older women, some of whom were "old crows" but not the men in a similar age group.
There was also a deferment for being married and/or having a kid. To this day you don't have to be rich for that. Eventually, when the went to the draft lottery they did away with that, but it wasn't that much longer before they did away with the draft altogether.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyewackette
The REASON it didn't work was that the rich jerks bought their son's way out of the war they supported. The draft was for those "OTHER" kids. You know. The ones that are looked down on. The poor. The minorities. You know. Because SOME people are the greatest at EVERYTHING, except when it comes to feet. Sad how something small like that will keep you out of the draft. That, and millions and millions of dollars.
Because the deferment system allowed a deferment for being in college, the children who came from money were going to get deferments, which was another way to target the poor and minorities. And IF you were a minority in college, even if you were in one of the targeted categories such as engineering, they often wouldn't grant a college deferment to a poor or minority student even when they qualified. I had a friend who was in the top 10% of his class in an engineering program who was drafted out of college. He was black. It wasn't an accident.
While I support people IN the military, I don't support this notion that EVERYONE would be improved by a stint in the military. Some people are just not suited to the life and some people (such as myself) just don't WANT to give up any autonomy.
Personally I got along fine with people from different walks of life while working my way through COLLEGE, thank you very much. Not everyone tolerates being brainwashed and ordered around at every single turn. And boot camp is more about the indoctrination than the physical part. Trainers will often say that the entire thing is intended to break you down so they can build you back up the way THEY want you. Of course some people only last through the breaking down part and don't even make it to the building back up part.
I don't need that. Feel free to subject yourself to that process if you'd like. My dad grew up in a tar paper shack, I guarantee you I was ALREADY familiar with people from all walks of life. And that includes different races and ethnic groups.
Understand that even if YOU personally had a great experience in the military, that isn't always the case for other people. Like that guy who posted about how he was in Vietnam for 8 whole months and NOBODY died with what-are-the-rest-of-you-whinging-about sort of implications. I'm glad that guy was so lucky. I don't know of a single other Vietnam war vet known to me for whom that was the case.
I think I have a very different outlook on the draft than my parent's generation did. I think MOST of us have a different view of it than they did back then, but maybe I'm wrong about that. For me, it is mostly related to the fact that there hasn't been anything that was clearly a "just" war since WWII. Getting drafted to protect White Man's Privilege at the expense of the locals in some Asian (or Arabic) country halfway around the world doesn't spring to the forefront of my mind as the basis for a "just" war.
I think I have a very different outlook on the draft than my parent's generation did. I think MOST of us have a different view of it than they did back then, but maybe I'm wrong about that. For me, it is mostly related to the fact that there hasn't been anything that was clearly a "just" war since WWII. Getting drafted to protect White Man's Privilege at the expense of the locals in some Asian (or Arabic) country halfway around the world doesn't spring to the forefront of my mind as the basis for a "just" war.
Yeah, that must have been Hell dodging bullets in Ohio. What was it that made WWII more just than any of the other wars? Because FDR ignored the signs that would have allowed the US to stay out of it had he done something to avoid it? I'm not saying WWII was an unjust war, just that the reasons for getting into that war are not always that much different than any other war. It's sometimes just a matter of a few degrees diffference.
I have put a preposition in bold in part of your comment because I wonder if it is the right one. The internet gives us a voice about where we are headed, but that is not the same as having a voice in where we are headed.
We can gasbag our guts out on the internet but Iraq gets invaded, and comments have little basic influence on what happens in the chaos that is our involvement in a major religious war in the Middle East.
I am afraid the internet is instrumental in our delusions about our power as citizens.
The internet has been instrumental in getting the word out to house who are willing to get involved in making changes.
I'm with the OP. Even *I*, who would have been about 9 or 10 at the time AND a girl, was constantly on the edge about the draft and the war. It wasn't JUST ourselves we were thinking of - it was friends, brothers, uncles, the relatives of our friends. Everybody knew someone who was MIA, KIA, drafted, joined, crippled mentally or physically, or run away to Canada.
Yeah, it WAS kind of nuts. But then WAR Is over the top nuts. And this was no WWII, with clear bad guys who were attacking other countries. It was a war to make the French happy because they didn't want to give up their colony and not get to abuse the locals there any more.
Actually, the French lost their colony as well as their own country during WWII, and Truman promised to help France get Vietnam back. Dumb move in my opinion. I understand Ho Chi Minh even tried to get Truman to help their side, and when he refused, Ho got help from Communists to the north. The rest is history.
The internet has been instrumental in getting the word out to house who are willing to get involved in making changes.
I wouldn't disagree with the above comment. Getting the word out, sure.
But my question was and remains what it was in the previous post...what are the changes that all this "internet getting the word out" made with the invasion of Iraq, the intervention in the Middle East religious war, etc.
We have a tendency to believe that if we chew the rag something is happening, and what is happening is that the rag gets worn out. People have been pounding their fingers bloody posting since the War on Afghanistan and yet that dubious effort was followed by the Invasion of Iraq which upset the boiling religious stewpot in the Mideast and still our government (and other foolish governments) continued and continues to do what it pleases....close to two decades of "getting the word out" and zip, zero, nada to show for it.
Delusion.
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