For whatever reason, the topic of instituting the draft has come up a lot, lately. It’s this unspoken assumption, I suppose, since Bush’s “troop augmentation” strategy as outlined in our last State of the Union. That assumption being, of course, that as we continue wallowing in the totally amoral quagmire that is Iraq (and as things continue to escalate with Iran, among other countries), we’ll revert back to the days where the nation’s young men are semi-randomly called upon to “serve” democracy. (What double meaning those words have.)

Today I was at a local florist where the conversation, oddly, turned to the draft. Mentioning the shooting that occurred just a few steps away from my apartment, one rather corpulent white man mentioned to his two pals that he had his iPod had been robbed by a black youth a couple blocks away, and that laptops are routinely being stolen from the coffee shop around the corner; his disenfranchised middle-class white pal started in under his breath: this generation needs a draft to thin out its numbers, get the dregs off the street. Both cronies agreed. Having some small background in cultural studies and liberal arts — and still being of prime drafting age — I bit my tongue and flashed a dirty look as I left, seething.

Was I really at a florist in the Lower Haight in San Francisco? Is this really how people feel? That my generation’s “wasted youth” would be better served in Bush’s war(s) in the middle east? I… I don’t even know how to end this post, but I should probably do that now before I really fly off the handle.