The Military and its Ghosts
There’s an obsession with serving the idea before the idea holder. Nothing is more an example of this than the military. The concept is simple: a person fights for a power, and the power pays the fighter. However, the mercenary becomes more than hired. The moons orbiting around the title transform him. He becomes a protector of us, our nation, and our God. But what the soldier protects are floating outside of reality. They are ideas.
Bullets are real. Bullets will drill through your heart and kill you no matter how much you beg for it to not be physical. However, ideas exist differently. Ideas do not occupy the same space as the physical – they exist in spirit and require constant cooperation from their idea holder. Yet, no matter how much the church, the state, or the patriot assumes the existence of the spiritual, they cannot make the spirits physical.
For someone to throw their life or their labor to the spirits of honor, nation, God, or any other floaty justification is foolish, yet the military thrives. On campus are recruiters armed with pamphlets, t-shirts, the promise of identity and brotherhood in servitude to the state, an escape from economic uncertainty and intense feelings of powerlessness which the state preserves, and a pullup bar.
But you, the student knee deep in ideals, isolation, and insecurity, where do your interests lie? How much are you being payed, and is it worth it? You’re being lured into becoming a servant to state and, if not the physical, ideas. That which cannot touch you you let put onto you a collar. In the endless vortex of ghosts around your head, you are real. Deny imagined chains. In the end, all that you have is you.
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