The Militarization of Children

Two weeks later and I find the time for another post, and this one has some flavor to it as well. Perhaps it will cross some generational lines: reaching the young, the adult, the mid-lifer, and the old. But on with the show: I found myself flipping through a magazine dedicated to the X-Box gaming system a few days ago at work, which is not unusual as I work at a technology company. I found several ads in the magazine for war simulation games: Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon", Tom Clancy’s “Splinter Cell”, "Call to Duty 2", "Quake 4", which is Sci-Fi, but characters use military structure and the premise they are saving the world from some great evil, some new game called “Mass Effect”, which is also a Sci-Fi game based on military structure and saving the world from a terrible evil, and some game that I cannot remember the name of but was sponsored by the United States Army, claiming it was their official game, which I found incredibly scary.

It was quite disturbing to me to find these ads, to find them so numerous in one magazine, magazines which young adults and adults alike are reading. It brought me to the consensus that children, young adults, and adults are slowly being inundated to a military lifestyle, desensitized to war and the things that accompany it, and are being corralled into finding war heroic, necessary, and glamorous. It’s underhanded and slimy psychology: they are training children, probably as early as ages 8-10, to learn how to take orders, as I’m sure these games shout at the children that their company is being slaughtered on a distant hill by enemy mortar fire and things of that nature, or they are standing on a blown-out rooftop in some urban setting playing the role of the sniper, the scope trained on your target’s face, ready to watch it invert and turn into a gaping hole when you squeeze the trigger gently. So they learn to react to people shouting at them, commanding them to do things, they are not thinking for themselves on some level; they learn to accept killing someone, watching patiently for methodical killing. And as a quick digression, the hardest thing for a sniper to do is pull the trigger. Snipers see every minute detail on the target’s face, every bulge and detail on their target’s body, they track and wait for their target for days at a time, and they gather a sense of knowingness and kinship with their targets. Conversely, we are training our young children/young adults to deal with this in simulated scenarios, training their minds to kill without hesitation which takes snipers, even though they are psychologically tested and approved for these positions because of their willingness to forgo this hesitation, months to fully get over the feeling, and children can do this without so much as blinking, perhaps with a smile stretched across their small faces.

Here’s the caveat: they are thinking, as they have to maneuver their character, and possibly an entire squad, through the level to accomplish objectives, but they are moving and thinking from the game’s instructions, curving their thought processes to think a certain way and react in certain ways, like a soldier would. These children, possibly your children, are “little soldiers”. These are not necessarily teaching them what is right and what is wrong, their senses of justice and injustice, what means of force is necessary and unnecessary, but it is certainly imbedding itself in these children’s minds, affecting their decision making down the road. And, folks, that’s honest. You, the reader can deny this if you like, claim that parenting and nurturing skills can curb this, or even prevent this, but you are simply being foolish. I, myself, am not a parent, but I have taught young adults for several years and I have been witness to peer pressure, witness to what is going on “behind the curtain” where parental and authority figures have no insight: parental powers are no match for the world that surrounds them. The world teaches in real-time lessons; parents can only guide them to the right roads and hope their children make the most of it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is Ender’s Game. If you have not read the novel by Orson Scott Card, I suggest you do. The Department of Defense is reenacting this, especially when you have a game sponsored by the United States Army, my god, how clear does it have to be? Desensitized to war, to violence, to killing a fellow human being for grand objectives which are only illusions anyway, they are creating the next generation of soldiers. They are creating new enlistees with every player, with every little girl or boy who picks up their High-Definition Weapon, points it at the “bad guy”, and puts rounds down range into this person’s body. At this point, I wonder do I really have to say anymore? Does the reader understand where I have gone and where I am going with this? Maybe. But just so we are clear: STOP THE MILITARIZATION OF THE YOUTH.