Can the military be an effective means of social change?

These are some of the beautiful children I got to work with in Athens, Greece at the Athens Refugee Center. From Afghanistan, these children, along with their mothers (and if they were lucky, their fathers) were traveling along the refugee highway, away from the violence that plagued their nation and disrupted their lives.

I heard so many stories of life back in Kabul. Stories that will haunt these children for the rest of their lives. If they were without their father, it was likely that he had been killed by the Taliban, and even worse, that they had been the ones to find him.

I don't promote war. I promote peace. I don't desire violence. I desire stability. But as I got to know these children and listened to their stories, their desire to stay living in their homeland, their desire to live in peace, their desire to remain a family, I couldn't help but feel that the US military had an important role to play in their lives. They needed such a large and quick movement to make the violence and the injustice stop. They needed protection. They needed people to care about their existence.

Before I went to Athens, I spoke strongly against the wars and even protested a few times. Nothing changed. I wasn't going to impact the war, the military, even US foreign policy. Instead I put my energy into writing letters to my classmates serving overseas and learning about the plight of those forced into displacement. And that helped me feel like I was influencing a more positive outcome of this war, but it's not enough.

My generation has come to expect the singing of God Bless, America for the troops in the 7th inning stretch. We expect to see the names of those military personnel lost in the past week on Sunday mornings. We expect to pray for our troops. War has become normal, it's part of our life, it doesn't sting like it should.

We should constantly be weeping at the thought of men and women forced from their families, both as military and as civilians in a war-torn country. We should not want war to last forever. I've come to the conclusion, as Capt. Casey mentioned more than once that the ability of these professionals to impact a very negative situation can be a good and even necessary thing. We need to reign in the length of time and money spent in our endeavors and also recognize a more abstract and strategic approach to how we impact people.

But for me, no matter what, these children deserve to be protected and their life deserves to be valued.

Can the courts be a catalyst for change?

I've always been more sure of what I didn't want to do with my life than really understanding what I did want to do. I didn't want to be a pastor and I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a change, I wanted to positively impact society, but for some reason, I knew there was going to be a different road than the traditional judicial or spiritual approach. I looked heavily into public policy schools, knowing my love for politics could easily translate into the makings of a good policymaker, but I realized that I believed more in a combination of a quantitative and qualitative research, not the almost completely statistical nature that public policy schools bring home. I want it to be both/and, not either or.

Before class today, I expected most of my reflection to be based around the idea that perhaps the abortion legislation has hijacked the whole women’s rights movement, but then class discussion steered more heavily into the realm of quantitative data, statistics, the very thing I wanted to steer clear from. Worse par t is, I found myself defending its use, especially for legislative purposes.

To be clear, I understand completely that statistics require a critical eye and careful interpretation. We must be fully aware that no research can be completely comprehensive and its more than likely that no answers will come from data, as it easily becomes outdated. All of this said, I believe very strongly in the use of numbers and quantitative research in order to make moves towards justice.

If we expected our legislators, our judges, our leaders, to base every decision they make on their own personal experiences or based on the experiences they have heard from others, I contend that our already slow and arduous law-making process would become even slower, even more obsolete. We need certain data to tell us which areas of town need public transportation more heavily than others, we need the census to tell us how best to distribute monetary funds, we need numbers to tell us which children are struggling in school. We need numbers and statistics as much as we need emotional stories of heartbreak and heroism. In order for our political system to function at a high level, we need to be fully aware of the demographics that exist in our country as a whole. Especially if there are parts of this country crying out for change.

That said, I still don’t want to be a lawyer. If Rosenburg’s The Hollow Hope reinforced anything for me, it’s that the judicial system takes a much larger stand after public opinion has already been swayed. They follow; it’s the people who lead. This does not make the judicial system at all unnecessary or never capable of creating change, but it puts a large emphasis on the understanding that all political bodies need to be at work, and preferably all at once. We need an organized community, armed with personal testimonies and empirical data alike, to inform and encourage our legislative bodies, who then create policies to fulfill the people’s need. Those policies need to be interpreted by our judicial body and then enforced through the executive branch. And going further, we need people to respond and criticize the policy measure and let the whole process begin again.

I do believe that politics and quantitative research have an important place in our desire for change. Meshing with the qualitative and passionate aspects of society, chances of success will be high. It’s mixing of the black and white that makes such an approach so appropriately gray.