You mean "fought their draft" in the sense of "avoiding being sent to Vietnam"?
Sure, that would make hypocrites of those who were draft dodgers back then, and advocate the draft now. But how many of those are there? I'd guess the vast majority of baby boomers who now advocate the draft weren't draft dodgers.
And AFAIK, compared to those who went, draft dodgers were a small minority.
>You mean "fought their draft" in the sense of "avoiding being sent to Vietnam"?
No... fought their draft as in "We think the draft is bull, this war is bull, and we don't want to go."
Hey, I could be wrong - I wasn't there to observe first hand what happened in the 60s and 70s. I only assumed the Vietnam draft was unpopular based on pop culture. Maybe boomers didn't sit around college campus blocking up traffic, chanting slogans, and smoking pot? Maybe there were never peace marches? The soundtrack of Boomer's youth? Largely works of fiction! 80s anti-war films? Anti-American propaganda!
If you're telling me only those who actively avoided the draft were against it, I believe you.
I should have just used my own eyes and ears to observe what Boomers have done since then. Baby Boomers in Congress and in the White House sent troops to Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with overwhelming approval at the time. Yes, there was lots of backtracking and second guessing after we stuck of fingers in those pies, but I guess that's a development that's arisen after Vietnam. Maybe the problem with those wars was there were no Commies to shoot.
I just didn't realize how much blood-lust Boomers held deep inside.
I stand corrected. Thank you for setting me straight.
> Maybe boomers didn't sit around college campus blocking up traffic, chanting slogans, and smoking pot? Maybe there were never peace marches? The soundtrack of Boomer's youth? Largely works of fiction! 80s anti-war films? Anti-American propaganda!
Cut it out with the bullshit: You know very well I never said or meant any of that.
But how many people does it take to sit around and smoke, chant, and block traffic? It's not as if it was necessarily new people at every sit-in, is it -- they could very well have been the same pot-smoking, slogan-chanting, and traffic-blocking protesters at most of those protests, right? Sure, they became the cultural phenomenon remembered from the time. To a large degree because, as you point out, of those 80s Hollywood blockbusters... And how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Hollywood blockbuster producers and directors did it take to make thoseand leave this huge imprint on the collective consciousness of posterity?
OTOH, AIUI a majority of draftees... didn't dodge the draft. The USA sent what, half a million young men? (or more?) over there. I'm not saying they all went willingly -- far from it, AFAIK -- but at least, those who went cannot, by definition, have been "draft-dodgers". So by my reckoning, compared to active protesters quite possibly, and compared to actual draft dodgers almost certainly, there were more non-draft-dodgers.
And also by definition, pretty much exactly all of those young men who were sent to Vietnam to fight -- the non-draft-dodgers -- were baby boomers.
So "boomers are hypocrites because they all advocate the draft now but dodged it back then" just doesn't make mathematical or logical sense. For one thing, even if many of them advocate the draft now that's not all of them; maybe the ones advocating it now are the same ones who obeyed it then, and maybe they've been quite consistently and non-hypocritically in favour of it all their lives. And for another, of course the bit about "they all dodged it then" is BS: If they had, there wouldn't have been any of them there.
Your rantings and ravings about Boomer Bloodlust aside, all I was pointing out was the bullshitness of this collective-hypocrisy accusation.
