Immediately after this version of Fortunate Son was performed on the Concert for Valor last night, protest of it being inappropriate started coming out. Funny, because I find it to be perfectly appropriate. Guess it depends on your perspective. When this song came out most of the people serving in the military had been drafted. Drafted to fight in a war that the majority of American youth had no desire to fight in, or believed to be justified. Literally hundreds of thousands of draft age people and Vietnam vets were protesting against this war. The difference is today we have no draft, so the vast majority of young people never have to worry about having to serve. So maybe this song was inappropriate, considering we have an all volunteer military. But one fact remains. President Nixon was right. If you remove the threat of military service from the affluent young Americans, you remove objections to how our military is used. For so many it comes down to: as long as my children or myself dont have to do it, I believe in you and I have your back. Which amounts to screw it you do it. But Ill put a support or troops ribbon on my car. End of conscription During the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon campaigned on a promise to end the draft. He had first become interested in the idea of an all-volunteer army during his time out of office, based upon a paper by Martin Anderson of Columbia University. Nixon also saw ending the draft as an effective way to undermine the anti-Vietnam war movement, since he believed affluent youths would stop protesting the war once their own probability of having to fight in it was gone. There was opposition to the all-volunteer notion from both the Department of Defense and Congress, so Nixon took no immediate action towards ending the draft early in his presidency
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 01:05:07 +0000
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