South-bashing

[BlueMTexpat]

90. TX also produced my maternal grandmother, LOL.

The one positive thing that the universal military draft produced was to remove people from their cloistered communities - wherever they were - and force them to get to know people from other regions of the US, with different practices, microcultures, dialects, faiths, colors, backgrounds, etc. and to discover that the old prejudices encouraged and taught within their cloistered communities just were not accurate.

Most discovered that those "others" - however different - were people just like themselves and in befriending them, their own lives were enriched as a result. We lost that sense of community (sort of like throwing the baby out with the bathwater) and now have become a nation of "enclaves" in too many ways, whether those enclaves are states or regions. Good people are and can be found everywhere in the US, as indeed they can be found throughout the world.

This is why I would love to see a mandatory national service for all US citizens, of which the military is only one option, that would get ALL Americans out of their parochial local settings so that they can truly experience what it means to be part of a nation. I dream and ask why not.