in the vein of "never join the military":
I've got an older friend (b.1950s) who wanted benefits and not to get drafted, so he joined the coast guard. how do you feel about the coast guard?
A) The coast guard is a branch of the military
B) I felt a lot better about it when it was at least nominally supposed to be more about search and rescue than it was about about "stopping drug trafficking" or "protecting our borders."
You are a lot less likely to be ordered to kill people if you join the coast guard than if you join the marines, but you are quite likely to be ordered to facilitate the capture and expulsion of refugees.
It continues to be insane to me that we've got a system that will provide you with lifetime benefits (no matter how marginal) for four years of agreeing to be used as a weapon but we don't have, like, a WPA where you can sign up for a term of doing infrastructure repair for four years of housing, a free education, and lifetime health insurance.
Like, you shouldn't have to sign up to do a term of hard labor in order to go to college or live in a building or go to a doctor but if we're going to offer those as benefits for bombing schools full of little girls why the fuck can't we do it for rebuilding the goddamned power grid?
