Have to bring these from Facebook to arlo.net where the arlo experts are and the arlo haditha is preserved:

Whyizzit:

Teachers try to link Arlo to Thoreau? That's just wrong. Arlo didn't disobey. He paid the fine and cleaned up the garbage. He didn't resist. He showed up for the draft and volunteered to kill. He didn't say fight the man. He said, "Sing my song!". He was a litterbug and a VW mechanic. He never said society is wrong; he said it's nuts. He belongs on the Group W Bench. With the rest of us.

Every Thanksgiving, radio stations play Alice encouraging young men to resist the draft that no longer exists? How many play The Pause of Mr Claus at Christmas encouraging them to light their pipes and resist the FBI that still does?

well........the draft ALMOST re-existed!

The one improvement in that is with Facebook and the Web we've gotten it down to 30 seconds to find out everything and we only have to give them 12. Progress.

No draft? Well, it's kind of a draft--If you engineer the economy so that the middle class is eliminated and most people are poor, and you dumb down the educational system so kids don't learn and as adults can't do much more than ask if you want fries with that, and you start wars to protect the multinational corporations' interests. Then you have put a lot of young people in the position that they can go into the military or see their families starve. And the most brilliant part is that everyone (including them) thinks they made a decision.

Military or FBI? I think it's that good old military-industrial complex (though it's evolved into the corporate-congressional-military complex) that the last (seemingly ever) good Republican president warned us about.

Thoreau resisted passively and went to jail for not paying his taxes. Arlo resisted too, I think, with mental judo--by using their stupidity against them while appearing to go along. And both influenced a lot of people by writing/singing about the experience. So I can see parallels, just not an exact match.

Back to work ...

It's much easier to have an all volunteer military in an economy with less choices and opportunity , so yeah, I knew that too Ceashel.
And, with stop loss orders in effect, people who have completed their obligations were kinda drafted too by being extended and called back.
The Bush legacy continues!

I knew that you knew, Larry. I was just kind of generally preachin' to the choir (mostly).

Aha!

The draft did exist during the Bush years! According to sources, (anyone who ever heard him speak), there was a draft going on, caused by the flow of air that moved freely between his ears......

<The draft did exist during the Bush years! According to sources, (anyone who ever heard him speak), there was a draft going on, caused by the flow of air that moved freely between his ears...... >

I used to dry my shirts there.

-Jim