The Spin Zone

This is an essay I wrote as part of a class I am taking, I thought I would share it here to see if there were any thoughts on it.

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I think that one myth that is bad for society is the myth of the soldier. The myth of soldiers who are driven by love of their country to fight to defend it. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that there are some soldiers out there that fit this myth – I think every myth has some truth. The truth of the matter is that people join the Army for a number of reasons, patriotism only being one of them. Another major reason that recruits will join, is financial, either they cannot find another job or they want money for school.

Then there is the aspect of how often they are really fighting to protect America in the most honest sense. Going back through history, it could be said that even the World Wars were not fought to defend America. I am not arguing that we should not have fought in those wars, but the true threat to America was unclear. More recently the war in Iraq- again not making judgments about its rightness – is not clearly being fought in defense of America.

The danger of this myth is it gives the public the wrong image of our troops and why they fight. In creating an ideal of virtue that isn’t complete in reality, it prepares the country to believe that the men and womyn who fight for us could do no wrong. When this trust is broken we forget that they are just people working under extreme situations and demean them for their actions. This image is bad for the troops because the image it creates of the troops is that they choose to fight and that their reward is achieved through the battle. I think if we took an honest approach to the occupation of soldier the way we do Police Officers, it would change the way we think about and treat our troops. An example of this would be a new discussion about the amount that we pay our troops, how does the pay compare to other dangerous and important jobs.

To be honest I don’t think that there are any positive myths in our society, or that this is possible. If we are talking about a myth as a way of talking about a subject in way that is different than it is. Truth is always the best, we cannot deal with things that we do not understand and we cannot understand what is not honestly expressed. I agree with Kennedy that myths are an enemy of the people. If there is a myth of racial tension, and the reality is racial harmony, the myth can change reality and create conflict. On the other hand there are situations where we assume that things are better than they are because we don’t want to deal with the conflict that it implies. In this regard I think with Samuelson that myths are maintained out of laziness and fear. The danger in this is that conflicts that are ignored do not solve themselves, and problems that need solutions are often pushed out of the public awareness because of confusion and the lack of courage to confront them.