It’s been called the poverty draft. The burden of maintaining our empire does not fall equally across the population. Empire? Interestingly, almost everyone outside the county and almost no one inside the country thinks that it is imperialistic. Inside the country, America has “interests” as in, “America needs to be involved in the Mideast because it has interests there.”

That’s why we don’t hear much about empire. Besides, it wouldn’t sell well. We hear about service to country. That’s what gets everybody. Being a good American. Defending the country and defending our freedom.

The catastrophe we call the Vietnam War - what the Vietnamese call the American War — soured the public on providing young American bodies for ignoble purposes. Washington took the message, and, in a response noteworthy for its caginess, eliminated the draft.

The need for young fighters was not coming to an end. Where were they going to come from now? Turned out to be a budgetary concern. The Pentagon never gets refused. The response was to pay young people whatever it takes to get them to enlist.

For a personal reflection, when I was inducted into the Army, my pay was $78 a month. At the time, a 4-star general made $1,700 a month. That’s about what a recruit makes today. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying they are paid too much. I’m saying they are paid just the right amount to keep the flow coming.

The modern military draws from the most disadvantaged segments of the population. They are enticed out of their low-paying, dead end jobs — or no job — with the promise of economic gain and career training. And, above all, security. You join the service and your worries are over.

In a country with spectacular levels of wealth and income inequality, and with pay prospects and security largely going to the managerial class or individual entrepreneurs, there is a steady supply of those without these privileges who see military service as a way out of their present life. For those who can pick up and go, it’s not a difficult choice. You never have to worry about what to eat, where to sleep, or what to do when hurt or sick. It’s a pretty accurate description of welfare -- welfare in service to empire.

Three American troops were killed Jan. 28 while stationed overseas in Jordan, victims of a drone attack. Two of them were platoonmates, young Black women. They both hailed from Georgia, but they could have come from anywhere, including the communities that this newspaper serves. It likely has.

As social creatures, we are adept at intuiting situations on a scale our lives generally encounter. Even for specialists, there are difficulties in relating to the infinitely small or the infinitely large. Deaths in the tens of thousands, or even millions, register in the brain but do not move the heart any more than isolated, solitary deaths. Emotionally, we do not seem to be wired for grief and empathy to multiply in proportion to loss.

Fernando Pessoa touched on this in these exquisite lines:

“They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.

But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.

I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,

Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.”

A New York Times article notes the women, Breonna Moffett (23) and Kennedy Sanders (24), “loved hip-hop, laughing with friends and the Army… representative of the type of Americans who increasingly serve in the military these days.” The touching personal description brings us down to an everyday level, one we can relate to. We are left to wonder, why were they standing under drones in Jordan?

Though only comprising 14% of the civilian female population, Black women make up 36% of all enlisted women in the Army. The article relates this without specifically locating Blacks, and particularly Black women, in the lower socio-economic class in which they are also overrepresented. There’s a class war, and the troops are not furnished by the winning class.

The Times fails to place the “open doors and equal opportunity” that military service provides, the “benefits that can be rare in civilian blue-collar jobs.” in the context of an economic system that places capital — pyramid-like — at the apex and working people at the base.

This would be bad enough. Breonna Moffett and Kennedy Sanders were drawn to the adventure and opportunity that was there for the taking, granted, but there’s more. If you could somehow join the Mafia, you could do as well. These young women, and countless others like them, think of military service as honorable. It’s honorable overseas, honorable on the ride home, and honorable once home, dead or alive. (Along with William Rivers (46), the three were ceremoniously received on Feb. 2).

You can even run for office. An honorable discharge from the armed forces looks great on a resume. That and a flag lapel pin go a long way. Seasoned politicians feel undressed without them. There’s a deep uniformity of opinion here. None of the managers of mass media, accommodated as they are to the power structures of the economic system in which they are embedded, would say or think otherwise.

After this has filled your head, a terrible, terrible thought could erupt. What if it isn’t honorable? Imagine that it’s all made up, and everything is the reverse. The military isn’t defensive. It’s offensive. (Like when we defended ourselves from Iraqis in Iraq). The military doesn’t serve the interests of ordinary people in the country. The military serves the interests of a narrow sector of corporate-connected elites. The military doesn’t adhere to international law and conventions. It violates them whenever it pleases. It’s all backwards.

The homeless and the destitute are major subjects of the day. City managers struggle with what to do with makeshift encampments. Nearby businesses don’t like them. People on the street and in cars are annoyed by beggars. The bombs we drop (or our foreign proxies) on foreign countries make the people over there homeless and destitute. It takes a holy faith in imperialism to be unconcerned about the connection.

Imagine that all the resources — money, assets, energy — consumed by our military overseas for destructive purposes were redistributed back into the home economy. For a start, imagine what that could mean for our local economy. We know how much trouble villages and towns are having in making ends meet. Now picture a massive civil works project reversing job creation for destruction with job creation for construction. Yeah, that’s it. Just reverse everything.