most of the time, it’s pretty easy for me to go through life knowing that some of the people that are closest to me don’t share some of the values i do. to me, it seems there is a decided lack of compassion on the other end of my marriage. this person lives in a very dog-eat-dog world, which is generally fine with me because it doesn’t effect me overly much.
my son is thinking of joining the national guard. he is being sent to oakland next week for his physical stuff. he’s an adult now, and the rational part of my brain knows that he now has to make his own decisions. but he has these romantic notions about what war and life are like that i know are not true. he wants the adventure, he wants to get out of our town. much of his current predicament is a result of his own poor choices. he had a 10,000 scholarship, in essence, and he blew it. he was more interested in partying than he was in doing well in college. he also owes the college a bunch of money from being careless with parking, so they won’t let him register for classes any more until he pays it and then he has to reapply for college as he’s not gone the last few semesters. he’s working full-time in a warehouse. he had to move after burning man, and he chose to get into a lease with a high-ish rent thinking he would have his girlfriend and two other people to help with rent. as they were moving the girlfriend broke up with him and said she wasn’t moving in, which essentially doubled his rent. he hates the warehouse because he used to work in an engineering firm and do stuff that he considers to be inifinitely more cerebral and important than stacking boxes. he has a second job at a mexican restaurant that’s been so slow he is often told not to come in….the economy. his work has screwed him over a few times, but the bitter part of me says "yeah, welcome to the real world, it happens". so he thinks he has no choice about joining the military. when he tried to get a car awhile ago, they told him he didn’t have any credit, so he went out and got a bunch, and now he has all that to pay off too. i tried to tell him that having credit is a double-edged sword….sometimes it’s better not to have, for having it means paying. i have always been a cash and carry sort of a gal, myself. i know my credit score has suffered for it, but i really don’t care because i don’t pay as much exorbiant interest and i keep more of my money than the average person.
the thing that has me feeling betrayed is that when i got home from a concert last night, my son was here talking to my husband. my husband is trying to talk him into going active duty rather than national guard. this seems like a huge deal to me. either way, if the boy joins, he’s going to war the way things are now. even with obama elected, people don’t understand that with the economy the way it is, he can’t bring all the troups home because there aren’t jobs for those men when they come home….it would cripple the american economy to have so many people home and unemployed. there are no jobs for them now, and it would make the market that much harder for those already here and unemployed also, having all those extra veterans in the market. besides, war isn’t something you just end, it’s been going on too long.
the hurt and angry and scared part of me says, of my husband "how could he?" all he’s ever known is the military, but it’s a different place now than it was when he was there, in active duty. he joined at a time when we had had over 20 years of relative peace. i saw a documentary called "the peace" recently that talked about the war, what led up to it and stuff. we have friends who’ve been over there and know how fucked up it is. we’ve had friends killed. it doesn’t help that my son has been speaking with some friends of his and is set to go into an MP unit they’ve already told him is deploying to afghanistan next fall. he is supposed to go to boot camp in february. he wants him to go active duty so that if he’s going to get blown up, at least he has a chance of seeing some other cool places in the world in between the times he is deployed to the war zones. hell of a theory, that. what’s a mother to do?
i told my son last night "there is always a choice when it comes to fighting or being a part of a war". he doesn’t see it that way. i am verklempt. he has to do what he sees as right, i just don’t want my son damaged forever for some idiotic sense of heroicism, some misguided sense of obligation or some false sense of "need". he does have choices, but to him all the other ones lead to misery. the largest misery could be the one he’s making.
i am unbelievably sad today.
there is no peace.
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