You Are Not Alone

My father sent me a link to a page called Eject! Eject! Eject! that has an article (or two, I suppose) called "You Are Not Alone". This article is largely about the precarious balance between cooperation as a society and self-advancement, about the need for just action in the face of exploitation, and the role of incontrovertible character and duty in a society rife with criminal personalities and self-destructive short-mindedness. It excited me enough that I had to start this post before I was finished with the second half of the article, so forgive me for failing to mention a strong point. Only an hour til I must go to work, and I thought it possible that I'd talk on it so much just posting the link that I wouldn't get it posted until after work, when I could possibly lose the necessary luster to expand my thoughts on it.

Anyways, there is more concentrated common sense and sound, educated logic in the first segment alone than I've read in anything since Atlas Shrugged. It's written very intuitively, the author addressing next exactly what you probably conclude from reading it. It's therapeutic, both encouraging against the feeling of isolation we all have and reinvigorating the sense of logic in our most dear creeds.

A few things came to mind as I was reading it. One was: How much do you suppose the math of the game theory figures into it? I wonder if it makes much difference that it's six months versus two years imprisonment, if the results and their ethical implications would change if those seemingly arbitrary numbers came to a different ratio. As I was reading it, I thought it could be possible that a lower sentence, say a year, for non-betrayal might change the results drastically, but now, thinking on it more, I doubt it.

I just came to the part in the second segment about how isolating yourself from society is no way to show courage, or to improve anything. This is something I've wrestled with for years. Often as a kid I thought life would be much better if I could go live as a hermit in the mountains somewhere, that in that way I could show the world that my ideals could result in success, because I was so often jaded by the cruelties, the illogic, the cowardice of the perceived masses that I never wanted to participate. As time went on, though, I began to see the benefits to immersing yourself in your enemies; that thinking largely encouraged me to go to Augustana, where I knew plenty of loud-mouthed anti-patriots and liberal elitists would challenge my assumptions and give me something to challenge, to conquer, in return. As a result, I further developed my ideals, expounded upon them and learned what logic specifically guided my character, but at the expense of feeling too often beaten down by what appeared to be the norm. I still waver back and forth between those two viewpoints, mostly because it is very unsettling to try and stand strong in the face of fierce opposition and see your beloved ideals attacked and belittled. But I know now that strength is one of my highest goals, and that my beliefs, my character cannot be strong without tempering both in the fires of ordeal. Ha! I wish to stand high atop the piled bodies of my defeated foes!

ANYWAYS, it's not a perfect article but it's damn close. I encourage you all to read it and consider it. Perhaps I'll expound upon it more when I get back from work...but I always say that, and it seldom happens. Let me know what you think about the article.

Soccer

Sarah coached a team of 7-year-olds in soccer this year, and today being their last game and banquet, I went to show my support and such. First of all, the kids were really cute and though I'm not nearly as good with kids as, say, Alex is, it's still pretty delightful to be around ones so young and bright and full of energy and excitement.

The game and people at it brought to mind, though, a conversation Sarah and I had a couple months ago. I was extolling the virtues of moral absolutism, and saying that the relativist apologists are the cause for so much self-victimization that's crippling our society and keeping us from being strong. I said that people must be held to their successes and not be allowed to excuse every shortcoming, to coddle themselves into complacency. Her response was that especially with kids, you can't urge them to succeed so much that they become hyper-aware of their failures or they'll become stagnated in their shortcomings. I thought she was suggesting coddling people so they don't get too hurt, so it took us awhile to reach a consensus. That consensus ended up basically being that everybody should be aware of what they're doing well and what they're doing poorly and be able to take advantage of that knowledge to improve themselves, using the knowledge of their failures to work towards improvement and the knowledge of their successes to provide the self confidence they need for that improvement. Or something like that. She said it much more eloquently than I am.

Anyways, there was a girl at the game whose parents, while being rightly supportive of her teammates, were quite literally screaming at her from the sidelines for somewhat minor things all throughout the game. The girl, in turn, was then hyper-aware of every time she did something wrong, and resorted to immediately making excuses every time she couldn't take the ball back or didn't block a goal. I was pretty put off by it, seeing as these kids are 7 years old and it's not like she wasn't trying. This reminded me of that previous conversation and I got concerned that maybe I was some kind of apologist, that next I'd start thinking we should transfer all prisoners to some kind of rehab facility where they can feel comforted that it's okay to commit murder so long as they later learn the error of their ways and feel bad. So, I rehashed the conversation with Sarah (she didn't know what I was talking about, because I'm probably the only person who remembers commonplace conversations for two months) and she put it perfectly (again, and as always) when she said she doesn't think you should apologize for people's shortcomings, that you should be aware of them and work through them rather than just forgetting about it. The key phrase for me was "not letting them indulge in self pity," which comforted me to think of it not as a concession to weakness but as a commitment to strength. It's a great way of putting what I'd been thinking all along and realizing that we were arguing two sides of the same point. So, yeah. I guess that's all I've got on this one.

Quantico

I believe I mentioned this in the last post...last drill I was asked to be a shooting range coach for our Marines who have volunteered to go to Iraq. So last Saturday (the 28th), I flew out of Moline and into Washington Reagan and rode a bus down to Quantico to teach some Marines how to improve their shooting. Evidently, they're raising a battalion of volunteers from within a number of different Reserve battalions to be sent to Iraq this summer, so they're spending two weeks in Quantico getting some boxes checked off their pre-deployment list, beginning with Table 1 and Table 2 marksmanship.

Table 1 is essentially their BZO (zeroing their rifles) and then prequalification in a standard known distance course, which is very similar to the service rifle target competitions Dad shoots. We started Sunday night with remedial courses on shooting fundamentals and about three hours of snapping in and dry firing. Monday we got them BZOed and ran through the prequal, in which I had five relays of three to five targets (so between 15-25 Marines and sailors) to assist. Many of them were pretty rusty, so it took plenty of catching up, but thanks to a great deal of advice from Dad and my fellow range coaches we ended each relay on a pretty promising note. Tuesday we went through rifle qualification, in which I was on the same targets more as a judge and safety official, and wasn't allowed to give direct advice. Most of my Marines and sailors did pretty well, including several expert quals and few unqs (unqualified).

Table 2 is a shorter version of what I used to call EMP, and it's essentially combat shooting with flaks and kevlars. They BZO at the 300 yard line and then move up to the 100 for moving targets, then up to...25 or something for multiple-target engagements and rapid position changes, standard combat shooting stuff versus the slower, more regimented Table 1 stuff. It's a bit more stressful because it's much faster and they stay locked and cocked the whole time, so there's more jamming, double feeds of rounds and just more safety issues to be concerned about, but it went off without a hitch. I felt it was pretty outstanding training for them all.

Thursday they had the grenade range, and our part as rifle range coaches was essentially over, so we did almost nothing all day, which was a pretty nice change of pace. We'd been standing in the hot sun all day (we were all redder than a Budweiser bottle by Wednesday) for three days, and had 3:30 a.m. reveille every day and worked til roughly 6 p.m. (hitting the rack around 7 p.m. out of pure exhaustion), so it's been a long and tiresome week.

Two of us had only signed on for the first week (those other poor fools haven't got anything to do but sit on a bus waiting for Marines to leave the field for the next week), so we flew back today, but that proved to be much more complicated than it ever needed to be. The sergeant who was supposed to drive us back to Washington Reagan pretty much doomed us by taking much longer than we had time for to get off base and head to the airport, and then we got stuck in the to-be-expected D.C. morning traffic and didn't even get to the airport til 9:45 a.m., five minutes after our flight was leaving and probably an hour or better after we should have arrived. We were originally slated to be back in Moline by noon, but since we missed that flight we couldn't fly back out of there til 6:30 p.m. and didn't get home til after midnight.

Part of me (a very small part) wishes I would have stuck around to participate in the rest of their training, because they've got some fun stuff going on. Today was ostensibly the gas chamber, which I haven't gotten to do since boot camp, Sunday's the crew-served machine gun range including the M240-G, M2 .50 cal., and supposedly the Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher (I'm going to be pretty furious if I missed getting to shoot the Mk-19, since I've never gotten to shoot it and those opportunities come rarely). It sounds like they've also got some urban combat training (MOUT) next week and probably land nav...and the biggest thing I feel like I'm missing out on is next Friday they're going to see the Marine Corps Museum on mainside in Quantico. That's something I've been infatuated with getting to see since I first heard about it, so I'm a little upset that I won't get to see it. I did, however, get to see the Commandant's building, most of mainside, and TBS (in fact, we did all our rifle qual stuff at the TBS ranges).

Downsides of this week: extremely sore feet from standing and walking around all day long, nasty sunburn, and just straight exhaustion from long hours and early mornings.

Upsides of this week: pretty much everything else. As Support Platoon, we were much more on our own program with significant responsibility and authority, as we had a significant billet (I was teaching a Marine captain who hadn't shot in years how to shoot again). Also, we had the great privelege of training a large group of Marines with limited time left in country before their deployment to a warzone, and that group was entirely volunteers, which is extremely motivating in and of itself. Having that billet of authority, I also was afforded the chance to really improve my bearing among seniors and develop a good deal of confidence in my own abilities as a Marine. I was able to essentially send off a great group of Marines feeling good about the training they'd just received with respect to what they might have to do in Iraq. It was a long week, but I'm extremely glad I got the chance to go help out.

P.S. I took the initiative to preemptively thank as many of those Marines as I could, because I knew you'd want me to.