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Stephen King vs some guy
By Wolfie | May 15, 2008
Stephen King’s taking some flak at the moment for comments he made about the US education system and how it’s failing its students. He suggested that many leave with barely enough education to function and have limited career options. He goes on to suggest that, because of this, many end up in the armed forces and are nothing more than cannon fodder in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A US commentator, Noel Sheppard, has attacked King for these remarks, claiming that King is betraying the brave American troops fighting to protect democracy and, further, that he’s called them all stupid. Commenters on Sheppards blog have attacked King for his liberal views, his writing and for being too dumb to get out of the way of a moving truck.
But I think they are all missing the point. From what I’ve read, King is saying that if you don’t get a decent education your career options are going to be limited; when your options are limited, the armed forces are an easy way out of the unemployment / poverty trap. That’s not to say that there aren’t very many armed service personnel who have got a decent education and have still made a positive choice to join up.
And once upon a time you might well have been able to come out of school with no qualifications, joined up, trained and be sure that you’d come out ten years later with a good education, a wealth of skills that you could apply in the private sector and the same number of limbs that you went in with. But those days are gone. We live in a world that is constantly at war and the ‘developed’ nations - the US and the UK especially - seem to feel the need to police it all. This means that if you sign up today, the chances are you’re going to see active service. And that means you’ve got a better than average chance of dying or being severely injured.
To me, what King is saying is that if you get a decent education you give yourself options. If you still want to join up, off you go and may your God go with you - but please be aware of what you’re getting into.
At the end of the day, Sheppard is entitled to his opinion and he doesn’t have to agree with anyone else if he doesn’t want to but what he seems to be doing - in telling King off for calling soldiers dumb - is saying that there’s nothing wrong with the war in Iraq; it’s a perfectly legitimate conflict that the US has every right to be involved in and that the 4,000 US service personnel that have died there have done so in the glorious service of their country - rather than so some dumb southern redneck can tell his Daddy: “There, I finished what you started”. The war in Iraq is wrong, it has helped no-one and it has cost thousands of lives - so who’s the dumb one, Sheppard?
Categories: Politics, Rant-O-Meter |
Tags: Noel Sheppard, Stephen King, Stupid, War
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