I'm juggling more balls, or spinning more dishes (a different circus act), thanks to my ramping up within my Clarusway work environment again. I get a different email account and access to the various company drives containing courses I'll be teaching and/or have taught previously. Having both accounts active and switching back and forth means blocking / unblocking various Google drives and so on, as I switch identities.
I'm thinking back to my childhood and growing up and how "government issue" took this weird turn such that "GI" meant a lot to people, in terms of both "the GI Bill" and "GI Joes", the latter being plastic dolls with more of a social role than Ken dolls, being soldiers. None of the Kens were military if I'm not mistaken.
In some alternative worlds, Uncle Sam issued "GI phones" as a kind of fallback smartphone anyone could get with sufficient proof of need, maybe not income based. Simply claim one. The apps would offer courseware deliberately tailored to groom (not a bad word) future government personnel.
If you want to keep living in a democracy, you have to plan ahead, and having everyone grow up in non-democratic hierarchies (not every church or corporation is an unprogrammed Quaker meeting recall) is hardly a way to nurture the relevant skill sets. No wonder we're all out of diplomats.
When all you have are amateur paramilitary types (Ollie North types as I call 'em), then all you get are covert operations. You need real statesmen to preserve a civilization, vs having rogue gangland mercenaries commit NS2 type terrorism, by definition not the game of proudly overt states.
We've fallen below threshold, perhaps because we no longer have "GI anything" anymore. GI just means "gastro-intestinal" today, and just about every joe or jill has a tract like that. No government can take credit for such basic gear and equipment.
I wouldn't be the first to suggest Ken needs to learn from GI Joe, in terms of knowing how to fly a helicopter and lift stranded hikers off mountains. EMTs in general like adjacent to the Coast Guard, in turn adjacent to the other branches.
We learned during that South Pacific tsunami during Dan Rather's tenure that the GI people enjoy responding to natural disasters, helping people, regardless of "race, religion or credo". That's a hint, I think, about how to rebalance.
We need a breed of GIs that aren't cannon fodder for the grand strategist wannabes who still think like its the 1900s.
