A county council I used to report on once spent several days in a thorough review of all of its government’s operations, policies, structures and budgets. Most of the questions were directed to the county’s finance director, a retired Marine officer who wasn’t given to much embellishment.
As he explained how things were done in human services, law enforcement and sewage treatment — and why they weren’t done some other way — it didn’t take long for him to run out of euphemisms and jargon. So he soon reached an understanding with the chairwoman of the council, who said to him, “If the answer to any of these questions is, ‘Because we’ve always done it this way,’ just say so. We won’t hold it against you.”
The process went a lot faster after that.
Inertia is powerful stuff, in government bureaucracies and in the evolution of humanity.
Consider the reason Sen. Mike Lee gave for his strong opposition to the idea that, if the United States ever again institutes a military draft, it should include women as well as men.
“Men are supposed to protect women and children, not the other way around,” Lee said. “Everyone in all three groups knows this, however unfashionable it may be to say in some places.”
It’s unfashionable because it’s nonsense. An extreme example of “We’ve always done it that way” thinking. And proof that Lee has never seen “Aliens.” Or the last three Star Wars movies. Or just about any movie with Scarlett Johansson in it.
The U.S. Army hasn’t drafted anyone since 1973, as American involvement in the Vietnam War was slowly winding down and Richard Nixon realized that he could defuse a lot of the opposition to that war if nobody was forced to go and fight in it.
But something called the The National Commission on Military, National and Public Service has issued a report saying that any future draft should reach women as well as men. To leave women out, the panel said, is unfair to women, judging them less valuable than men, even as it denies the national security establishment of a lot of necessary talent.
Lee argues that women, on average, are less physically powerful than men. Which, on average, they are. But no person is an average. It only makes sense to test everyone in uniform, draftee or volunteer, and sort them according to ability. Most women may not make the grade to be Rangers or SEALS. But most men won’t, either.
And, as the commission noted, many military assignments do not involve slogging through the mud while carrying a large machine gun over one shoulder and a wounded comrade over the other. Armies have always needed a long tail behind their tooth, supplies and records and payroll and medical and transport and, increasingly, intelligence and cyberwarfare and drones and stuff that’s so secret we don’t even know about it.
Women, and men, who aren’t really suited to a forward combat role can do all that other stuff, necessary stuff, and free both the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and the Angelina Jolies among us to carry the rifles and drive the tanks.
Pushing buttons
And the disruption caused by what, to many, may feel like being sucked into a black hole of change, Stephen Hawking explained, can emit bursts of radiation that can be detected across galaxies.
Jeffrey Holland, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, took lot of heat for his speech opening the year at Brigham Young University, a speech in which he took shots at those at the school and within the church who are more or less openly uncomfortable with the faith’s continued opposition to same-sex relationships and marriage equality.
Meanwhile, Natalie Cline, a member of the Utah State Board of Education, is in trouble again for yet another social media post in which she denigrates LGBT people and, especially, any efforts by Utah schools to accept them.
Both Cline and Holland are pushing buttons that stoke anger among our homophobic neighbors and fear among the targets of that hatred. Violence and suicide are all too likely to be among the results. Certainly the pursuit of education, at BYU and in Utah public schools, is not enhanced. (As BYU’s chances of getting accepted into a major athletic conference are seriously diminished.)
Those of us who know they are wrong, though, should understand that they and a great many like them are afraid, even brokenhearted, and it isn’t surprising that they will be raging, raging against the dying of the light.
Except the light isn’t dying at all. It’s just being distributed a little more evenly across the universe, to the detriment of no one.
That’s the way we’ve always done it.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) George Pyle.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, wrote too many words too close to deadline. Just the way he’s always done it.
gpyle@sltrib.com
Twitter, @debatestate
