"In the first place God made idiots," observed Mark Twain. "This was for
practice. Then he made school boards." The San Francisco Board of Education's
4-2 vote last week to abolish the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps
program, which has been active in the city's high schools for 90 years, tends to
support his view.
Why is JROTC being done away with? It isn't for lack of interest. More than
1,600 San Francisco students currently take part in its voluntary activities.
"Kids love this program as if it's family," notes the San Francisco Chronicle.
It is "a program that students and their parents wholeheartedly support."
Finances aren't the problem either. Operating JROTC costs the city less than $1
million out of an annual school budget of $356 million.
Nor is the problem bad management. The Chronicle reports that "no one has
offered an alternative as coherent and well-run as JROTC."
Safety? Also not a problem. Though cadets have uniforms, they carry no weapons;
the nonviolent programs emphasize leadership, self-discipline, citizenship, and
teamwork. "This is where the kids feel safe," says one JROTC instructor, retired
Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Powell.
And the problem certainly isn't an absence of diversity. In a story on JROTC
cadets at Galileo High School, Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker writes: "These
students are 4-foot-10 to 6-foot-4. Athletic and disabled. College-bound and
barely graduating. Gay and straight. White, black, and brown. Some leave school
for large homes with ocean views. Others board buses for Bayview-Hunters Point."
Several of the students come from immigrant families. At least one is autistic.
So what is the problem with JROTC? There isn't one. The problem is with the anti
military bigotry of the school board majority and the "peace" activists who
lobbied against the program on the grounds that San Francisco's schools should
not be sullied by an association with the US armed forces.
"We don't want the military ruining our civilian institutions," said Sandra
Schwartz of the American Friends Service Committee, a far-left pacifist
organization that routinely condemns American foreign policy and opposes JROTC
nationwide. "In a healthy democracy . . . you contain the military." Board
member Dan Kelly, who voted with the majority, called JROTC "basically a
branding program or a recruiting program for the military." In fact, it is
nothing of the kind: The great majority of cadets do not end up serving in the
military.
But then, facts tend not to matter to smug ideologues like Schwartz and Kelly,
who are free to parade their contempt for the military because they live in a
nation that affords such freedom even to idiots and ingrates. It never seems to
occur to them that the liberties and security they take for granted would vanish
in a heartbeat if it weren't for the young men and women who do choose to wear
the uniform, willingly risking life and limb in service to their country.
According to The Chronicle, scores of JROTC students were on hand when the
school board met last week; many of them burst into tears after the vote. Sad to
say, they should probably have seen this coming. For in its trendy anti military
animus, the school board was hardly breaking new ground.
In 1995, San Francisco's board of supervisors wiped the city's famous Army
Street from the map, renaming it Cesar Chavez Street. Last year, city
supervisors refused to allow the retired USS Iowa, a historic World War II
battleship, to be docked in the Port of San Francisco. Like the school board
vote, the spurning of the Iowa was intended as a slap at the US military and the
foreign policy it supports. Supervisor Chris Daly explained his vote against
accepting the battleship by announcing: "I am not proud of the history of the
United States of America since the 1940s."
In 2005, San Francisco voters handily approved Measure I, a nonbinding ballot
question dubbed "College Not Combat," which called for the exclusion of military
recruiters from public high schools and colleges. The prevailing political
attitude was summed up in a Weekly Standard headline: "San Francisco to Army:
Drop Dead."
Not everyone feels that way. To his credit, Mayor Gavin Newsom excoriated the
school board last week for "disrespecting the sacrifice of men and women in
uniform" and warned that killing JROTC would only accelerate the flight of city
residents from the public schools. "You think this is going to help keep
families in San Francisco?" he asked. "No. It's going to hurt."
Going to? For 1,600 kids now faced with the death of a program that infused
their lives with purpose, camaraderie, and self-respect, the hurt has already
begun.
