Op-ed: Growing up in the Army helped make me a liberal RAW STORY

Published: Tuesday April 3, 2007 Print This Email This "Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal," writes Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv, in a guest column in Tuesday's New York Times. Wright, the son of an Army officer, who back in 1969 "was living in San Francisco, epicenter of hippiedom, antiwar fervor and utopian hope for perpetual peace," remembers his "family once driving toward the Presidio's Lombard Street gate past tens of thousands of protesters who seemed to think my father was part of a very bad outfit." "I was sure they were wrong, and I still am," Wright continues. "In fact, the whole, larger stereotype -- that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left -- is way off." According to Wright, "Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal -- not because I reacted against my environment, but because I absorbed its values. If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country." Excerpts from column: # People think of the Army as hierarchical, but compared with the private sector it's a bastion of egalitarianism. Yes, the Army's "blue-collar workers" -- privates, corporals, sergeants -- defer to its "white-collar workers," the officers. That happens in corporations, too. But on an Army base you don't send the white-collar kids to good public schools and the blue-collar kids to bad public schools. .... My father said Army people were as fine a group as you would ever meet, and the evidence was on his side. They were conscientious and unpretentious. And they can be surprisingly soft. Good commanders have a commitment to their troops that borders on love, a feeling that in the corporate world doesn't generally emanate from the executive suite downward. (I said love, not lust.) That's partly because in the Army, the stakes are so high. Sending people into battle isn't something a good person does with detachment. Before the Iraq war, when the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, testified that the postwar occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he was showing not just prudence but devotion. He didn't want his soldiers needlessly imperiled. # TIMES SELECT SUBSCRIBERS CAN READ FULL COLUMN AT THIS LINK



