I’m really disgruntled and displeased with the handout that was slid under my door Wednesday night. I think that both lecturer Thomas Walker and the person who initially annotated the paper before the copies were made have made some mistakes. While Walker is almost ignorant of the role the U.S. military plays overseas, he does make a few just points. Saying that the troops overseas are doing nothing for us sounds like an uninformed shot in the dark. At the point where men are laying down their lives for something, we can’t just say they’re doing nothing. Men doing nothing do not return massive death counts to the U.S. government each year.

As far as Walker’s initial concern, I think the annotator has completely missed the point. Walker’s concern lie with the balance of distribution of goods. Though he sounds like a radical socialist at some points in this article, his concern is not really to ask if GIs are paid adequately, or to state we’re wasting time and money on the troops because they are already pampered. He’s saying in the social environment we live in, there are men less fortunate than our GIs, prominently our former GIs — our veterans. He’s really asking, “If we have the time and resources to give to those in need, why aren’t we giving it to the most desperate of our American people first?”

Again I think that the annotator missed the point of the fetus comparison. Yes, Walker does compare soldiers to fetuses, but in this situation he probably could have compared them to candy. All he’s saying is that Republicans rally to save fetuses and rally to send goods to troops. But once the troops have been released, once they’ve done their service to America and are plunged back into our society as veterans — that’s when they face their true need, but that’s also when Republicans (or really society in general) chooses to stop appreciating them. Like a “discarded zygote,” they no longer are of a concern to the people because essentially they’re “useless.”

I think Walker overstepped his boundaries, not as a man in a free country, but as a professor at an institution. Though it’s clear from his writing he is more than literate in his area of study, it does not make him a political science expert. This shows in his ignorance of how the U.S. troops function and how our political party system works. As a student with a father who works for the military overseas, I was offended by a plethora of his comments, especially near the end where he states that these soldiers “chose to leave home.” That does not mean for any reason they are without human feeling and want to leave their families, it simply means they are carrying out what their jobs demand of them. Workmen should be careful when their employment is made up of a body of students with varying unique social statuses and home environments. I’m sure I was not the only “military brat” to be put off by his brash comments.

That said though, I do think Walker was out of bounds a few accounts. I don’t really think that the annotations made to the article that was then slid under doors of a freshman dorm was a smart choice either. I would not question the concept of students only reading the comments on the side and sending in angry letters of agreement to the paper. Or calling their parents to angrily touch on something they’ve only read other people’s pointers on.

Walker makes some good points in his paper as far as equality goes, he just happens to mar his own credentials with the rude and benighted comments he rounds the article off with.