Military Life

I am beginning to feel friends are not worth it.  Moreover I am beginning to feel that a heterosexual romantic relationship is like a thousand scorpions in your crotch.  With what we see on television, in movies (what is left of them), and experience in real life, it would seem everyone is your enemy.  What's the point of trying to have friends?  In our neighborhood it has become the military way.  Young parents with no college education and rug rats under their feet.  This morning it made me for the first time understand and appreciate a college education.  We are surrounded by military people with no college education, and I am not disparaging them.  I am pointing out the difference, and that difference is four years of college adds four years of knowledge and experience.  It is not knowledge you must accommodate to keep your job like the military.  Civilian life is not regimented like military life.  You don't have to be physically fit nor show up for PT early in the morning.  You don't have a weight requirement.  You don't have to wear fatigues or dress blues every day.  You don't have to kill the enemy.  I would say there is a stark and vast difference between military and civilian life, although in decades passed military families tried to assimilate more into civilian life.  Four years of college produces noticeable differences in one's day to day life.  What happens in this four years?  There is regimen of its own.  You must register for classes and pick your sections establishing your own weekly schedule.  You must adhere to this schedule, attend these classes, study and learn their material, and pass exams proving you have learned the material.  Much of this activity is done while living on your own for the first time away from home.  Immediately you are tasked with achieving a balance between a newly emergent social existence and academic study.  There is a high drop out rate for colleges and universities, and these institutions are more than happy to take your money for nothing.  The North Carolina State Legislature has approved the highest level of tuition increase each year whether it was needed or not.  Hence a college education comes at an exorbitant cost in American dollars, and because of a changing world it is not as applicable to real life today.  Having a college degree does not ensure you will be offered a job.  Consequently states have cut corners and refuse to pay the extra benefits of further education.  Terminal degree holders have become forsaken in America, because they are deemed to expensive to hire and pay.  Companies like cruise companies would rather pay a beginner with no experience then a seasoned experienced professional.  Herein lies one of the problems with what has become our America.  Social mobility, wealth, and security no longer are provided or supported by the Capitalist socioeconomic system.  They are commandeered by the wealthy.  The Middle Class in America has shrunk like a cold penis.  We have become a third world nation without knowing it.  After working at sea in international waters for over a decade, coming back to America is a major downer.  Veterans are experiencing the same.  With all of this lack of social mobility, accruing of wealth, and security America is not much fun.  Now some unknown faction is trying to kill us all with a deadly engineered and manufactured pathogen.  A handful of truths have emerged in the wake of this pandemic.  One is Big Brother is watching and listening to everything we say or do.  While Amazon's Alexa is a logical choice for this surveillance, I think it is coming from satellites.  Google's satellites would be the most logical.  Okay, so most of these military families have not benefited from the collegiate environment.  In most likelihood they did not excel in high school or even graduate at all.  They are people looking for guidance and identity.  Making it past these needs is not a priority, because these things conveniently are provided by Uncle Sam.  When your Commander and Chief asks you to attack the Capital and stop the confirmation of America's presidential election, what do you do?  Are you smart enough not to follow these orders and make your own ethical decision?  That is not what is asked of you in the United States military.  Simply you are asked to go kill the enemy, and they tell you who this enemy is.  Needless to say military families operate in a different theater of life than civilians.  Why have I come to believe friends or romantic interests are undesirable.  Could it be that the extreme right newly emergent Republican party has pitted Americans against one another.  If you do trust or confide in anyone today, certainly you are exposing your flanks.  It is impossible to establish solidarity in America today, because half of Washington, DC is trying to resurrect the Jim Crow Era of the American South.  People are not able to care about you, and why should they?  Everyone except the wealthy merely are trying to survive in a war torn nation.