I had one item here I was going to cautiously blog about, and then a second came up by surprise. I'll start with the second and take it first.
I ought to note that these are both items that figure into the "fools rush in" category of things.
Dissing the Guard
National Guard M88, South Korea, 1987.
A friend of mine called me up mad.
He and I had been National Guardsmen together at about the same time.
"Yeoman, you and I both took basic and advanced training at the same time and you know that we were at Ft. Sill so long that we received discharges from the Regular Army".
"Um, yeah. . .?"
"Then why aren't we veterans?"
"Um, well Phil, we are. . . "
Phil went on. What he meant was that while we are both veterans, with honorable discharges from the U.S. Army, we don't qualify as veterans for Federal employment consideration.
Phil is correct. According to an online Guard publication that's supposed to be in the nature of good news for former Guard members:
ARLINGTON, Va. – A recently signed law gives official veteran status to National Guard members who served 20 years or more. Previously, Guard members were considered veterans only if they served 180 days or more in a federal status outside of training.
Twenty years or more. . .
Phil lost his job in the oil slide that's been going on over the past year and he's been looking for a new one. He's not out of work actually, he's a handy guy and one of those people who seems to pick up employment even with things are in the dumps. Having worked at the same place for now 30+ years I'm not a handy guy, that way, and even though I can do a lot of things, I know that if the same thing happened to me, I'd be doomed.
"Thirty years as a lawyer? Go apply at the U.S. Attorney's office. . ."
"But sir, I'm the only living person who knows how to plow a field with a California Plow and a mule named Sparky and. . ."
"U.S. Attorney's office. . . "
You get the picture.
California plow.
Or so I suppose. I haven't seen any job openings for plowmen and for that matter, while I know what a California Plow is, I don't actually know how to plow with one with any sort of equine, let alone a mule named Sparky.
Which raises another point, one touched on below, but I'll get back to that.
I loved being in the National Guard and was in it for six years. So was Phil. That is, he was in for six years. I don't know if he loved the Guard but he didn't complain about it. Anyhow, we were in during the Cold War, which is significant here as it means that during our six years of service we were trained in, and told to expect, fighting the Red Menace.
It wasn't really obvious at the time that the Red Menace was having serious problems. Reddit Marxists would claim that's because "real" Socialism has never been tried, but the experiment wasn't working well and Poland left the orbit, followed by the collapse of the USSR. China was still a menace at the time, of course, but it wasn't acting like Wilhelmian Germany yet and was mostly a menace in its own neighborhood. Of course there was North Korea, like now, which makes a theme out of menacing.
Anyhow, during the Cold War era reservists didn't see much activation for small wars as, for one reason, there weren't very many small wars that the U.S. directly got into, as once it did, they turned into big wars. So, while the US messed around in central Africa and in Central America, it mostly did it in the late Cold War stage through proxies or clandestinely.
Once the USSR collapsed, that changed. In 1980 going into a war in Iraq would have been dicey with the USSR so near. In 1990, with the Soviet Union folding up, not so much.
So we drilled and trained and went to war games. But we never shot at Ivan, or Lee, or Chan.
Which is just fine.
But apparently that's not good enough for the Federal Government if you are seeking employment.
Cold War reservists can't claim veterans status of Federal employment forms.
My supposition is that post Cold War ones called into active service for various wars we've fought since 1990 can, because they were activated and therefore qualify.
Which is odd as Phil and I are veterans for other things. Indeed, it was once suggested to me that for some sort of vaccination I ought to go to the VA, which wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise.
Is Phil right that this is unfair?
Well, my instinct is that he's right. We served for six years in a climate which actually was dangerous to some degree. If there'd been the war we were training for, we would have had to go, and there's a good chance a lot of us wouldn't have come back. Our combat rating was as high as the Regular Armies, and just because we were also training from home doesn't really make an intrinsic difference in that. Sgt. Smith serving in the RA at Ft. Sill and Sgt. Smith working at Haliburton in Wyoming both would have seen the same combat experience. But only one of them is eligible to claim veterans status for Federal employment.
Without knowing for sure, I suspect that some of this is a legacy of really long prejudice in the active military against the Guard, and some of it is lingering prejudice from the Vietnam War. Thanks to Robert Strange McNamara and his bad of deluded technocrats combined with the bumbling of Lyndon Johnson the Guard was not deployed to the Vietnam War until late. The irony is that the US used the Guard in every major war of the 20th Century and couldn't have fought any of them, save for Vietnam, without the Guard.
The mishandling of the Army, including its reserve components, during the Vietnam War nearly destroyed the entire Army during the war and didn't lasting damage to the Guard's reputation. Often missed in the story is that by end of the Vietnam War the U.S. Army was in such bad shape that it was rapidly reaching the point of combat ineffectiveness in the war and it was in a very sorry situation everywhere else. The Guard had declined during the war as well as it became a haven for those trying to evade active service, although following the war it rapidly became a haven for combat vets that weren't able to adjust back to civilian life, meaning that it had an inordinate number of combat veterans. By the late 1970s both forces were rebounding and today they're both excellent.
Be that as it may, the intentional decision not to deploy the Guard during the Vietnam War in order to avoid community discontent by removing a large number of men from any one town lead to some prejudice against it that lingered really until the Gulf War. Never mind that those soldiers who served in it during the Cold War would have been just as likely to die in any major conflict as a soldier of the Regular Army, and also never mind that by and large the US avoided the small wars that its fought since the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, out of a fear that they'd turn into big wars. And, as noted, the Regular military has had a prejudice against the Guard that runs back to the 19th Century, even though time and time again its proven unmerited.
So, while I don't know this for certain, I suspect that Guardsmen and Reservists whose Regular service was for training, no matter how long, are dissed in Federal employment due to a legacy of this prejudice.
Or maybe because I was a Guardsmen who holds an Honorable Discharge from the Regular Army, I just think its unfair as Phil does. A personal connection with things will do that.
I'll note by the way that for some of us, that six years meant a lot more than "drills on weekends and two weeks in the summer". For one thing, some summer ATs actually run three, not two, weeks in length. Be that as it may if I include time in which I was simply employed at the armory by the unit in the summer, it's add about eight months of service to my original RA three, which would give me element months. Add to that actual drill times and training periods outside of the summer, I'm up over that. I figured once that I had about two years of time, cumulative, serving.
No matter, it wasn't twenty reserve time. So you can't claim the status for Federal employment purposes. It doesn't matter if your job was combat arms and the guy you are competing against manned the soft serve ice-cream machine in San Diego. . .he's getting the status and you are not.
Oorah.
The Old Rules on Male/Female Employment remain more than people imagine.
It's really common for articles to appear once per year decrying, and legitimately so, the inequality between the pay of men and women.
It's not that easy of a story, however, as often men's pay is due to their being in occupations that men gravitate towards and women do not, and often they're hard, physical and dangerous jobs. In Wyoming, where the income inequality is huge, lots of men have in recent decades worked as oilfield roughnecks.
Very few women have.
But it's a well paying job.
Statistics report that women still make less in truly equal positions, such as, supposedly, female lawyers making less then men, but I somewhat doubt those figures and if that was true, it's rapidly ceasing to be true.
The point may be that, in spite of the efforts of the Woke to compel people to believe that all occupations are gender neutral, in reality they aren't, and men and women tend to gravitate towards certain types of employment.
And one of those areas is the home, for women.
I don't mean to suggest that this is a poor choice in any fashion whatsoever, but rather note that this is a reality.
The reason that this came to mind, although I've thought about posting on it before, is also due to a discussion with a friend. The friend just turned 50 years of age and is now really focused on retirement.
It's an odd focus in his case as he has five children and none of them are out of school yet. None. That means that he has years and years to go in which they'll be in school, and then in university. I don't know the ages of his younger kids so I don't really know how that plays out, but it would mean that he'd be at least 60.
I'd also note that his wife opted to stay home to raise the five.
In our conversation, he mentioned age 55, but that's not realistic in his case at all Be that as it may, it turns out to be the case that at age 55, or maybe 55.5, a person can start drawing on their 401K in some fashion.
Now, this isn't retirement advice as I haven't studied this and I don't know what the parameters are, but I hit 55.5 over two years ago and that therefore was an interesting fact. It was an interesting fact right up until it dawned on me, which was pretty quickly, that my long suffering spouse is a little over ten years younger than I am.
That's significant as when people look at retirement they ought to be looking at the burn rate of their retirement savings. Will you have enough, that is, to last until you die?
Nobody really knows when they're going to die, of course, but a person retiring at age 55 probably ought to expect to live at least to their point of life expectancy, if not longer, even though they very will might not. It'd be the pits to burn through retirement by 65 and then be waiting for the Social Security check to arrive to buy groceries. Of course, that may well mean that a person in that position may die by 57 and never have retired. That may sound extreme but my father died at age 62 and he never retired. For that matter, his father was in his 40s when he died, and my long lived mother's father was 58 when he died. He was medically retired, however, at the time, not a pleasant situation either.
Anyhow, if you are happily figuring "hey, I'll have enough to retire at 55 if I plan on living until 80, when the last drop of my savings runs out", but your wife is 45. . . . , well perhaps you better rethink that.
And here's where the basic nature of the sexes comes back in.
At least in my generational cohort, a lot of women aren't as well educated as men, and their employment choices are therefore much more limited. They aren't absent, but they're limited. My wife's a good example. She has some post high school education, but not at the same level that I do.
Now, lots of professional men I know have a wife that's also a member of the same profession. They probably met at school or work. But here's where the difference comes back in again. I've known a fare number of women who have dropped out of their professional employment in order to stay home with children. I've known exactly one man, and only one, who has done the same.
Why is that?
Well, that's because its a feature of The Old Law. It may be the case that society holds that men and women should each have equal employment, but in reality, biology makes this a different matter. Men can father children, but they can't give birth to them, they aren't physically equipped to feed them when they are infants, and they aren't really emotionally equipped to nurture them when they are young. They just aren't. Women are.
Which is an application of biological reality and therefore, fine.
It also means, however that the iron law of male employment is always at work.
Men have fewer options on employment than women, in existential terms. Sure, by nature men can be roughnecks and by biology and temperament they're suited to be soldiers, which women are not, in my view. But they can't just drop out of the work force and stay at home like their wives can. They cannot.
They also at some point are not only pulling the freight, but for a lot of them are pulling it after they probably shouldn't be, as they have no choice.
Is that unfair? Well, probably some people reading this, if anyone does, are assuming I'm endorsing unfairness. Rather, what I'm doing is noting the way of the world. We may deem it personally unfair in all sorts of ways, but that's the way of the world. The fact that I have to wear glasses may strike me as unfair, or that the prior two generations of my male ancestors died young and diverted the agricultural directions of our family into the office, twice, may strike me as unfair. But universal fairness isn't part of the deal.
Basic biological reality, i.e., the difference between the sexes, isn't unfair, however. It just is. The fact that we ignore this to the extent that we do is because; 1) in an a period of unprecedented societal wealth we can get away with ignoring that to some extent, and 2) in the advance stage of the industrial revolution we live in, we've forced, for a bunch of reasons (many just societal) women into the work force full scale the way we did with men in the late 20th Century and 3) with really advanced technology and outsized industrial might, we haven't had to fight and evenly matched wars or quasi evenly matched wars since the end of the Vietnam War (which was evenly matched in part due to the competence of the NVA, and in part due to the fact that we also had to worry about full scale wars in Europe and South Korea, and elsewhere, the entire time).
So what of that? Well, not much. Just that the old existential laws are never far from the surface, no matter how much we might imagine that we're exempt from them.
