One lasting, valuable lesson I learned in Naval Reserves boot camp is that I am a pathetic representative of the absent middle class serving in the military who suffers delusional self-importance in my everyday life. Another valuable lesson I learned is that America’s salvation lay in the burgeoning Hispanic underclass as our middle class deteriorates from the corrosive effects of affluence. The most valuable impression I got from boot camp was how much more superior kids joining the Armed Services are to middle class kids who don’t, or won’t.

We as Americans are engaged in class warfare with the military fighting on the front lines of national opinion. As a member of the struggling middle class, we’re losing. Losing what, though? The advantage.

Two events stopped middle class kids from joining the military. Compulsory service ended in the 1950s and the volunteer military began, creating social silos of those who join the military. Kids are no longer required to serve their country for two years, remaining oblivious to all the American cultures they would have been exposed to. The American middle class is more isolated than ever before not just about global politics but also to the local politics of neighboring peoples.

Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s created a chasm between values of old and the values of the young, leaving a permanent divide in the middles class. World War II veterans insisted their sons serve in their country’s conflict, assuming the war was a noble cause in stopping the Domino Effect. However, leading us into the fight were truly ignorant politicians who through their bungling increased the consciousnesses of upcoming youth. They rightfully didn’t want to die at the hands of bungling bureaucrats. The trust of the citizens in their political leaders was broken and has not entirely healed.

That trust is further eroded by the distrust of military members from the lower classes begrudging the superiority complex of our cultural elites making military policy. People, who refuse to serve in the military, enact laws governing military action jeopardizing the lives of the soldiers who follow orders issued from ivory tower edicts.

The middle class rallies behind issues that are diametrically opposed to simple solutions. Cars are a good example. With their developed conscious, middle class consumers rally against exploiting the environment. Yet they are the only folks in large enough numbers who can afford to purchase SUVs that consume the most gas and pollute the air. Now they want every one else to stop driving these gas-guzzling cars. But there is no one else but those with money who are buying and driving these behemoths, except for enlisted soldiers.

There is a curious ‘car composite’ on military base parking lots, especially in the Navy to which I belong. The people who least can afford to drive the nicest cars. Enlisted personnel arrive in new luxury sedans, tricked out trucks, and elaborate sports cars while officers drive aging, average vehicles probably long paid off. However, in mall-riddled middle class America, the reverse is true. Aging, overweight, white collar executives amble into their enormous SUVs and land yachts while their children defy death in small contraptions that are also, egad, fuel friendly.

So the fat masses of the middle classes insist on driving their fat accommodating cars and demand that the gas for their cars is cheap… or… or… they’ll wage war! What those closest to the battle lines and those farthest away have in common are their cars. Poorly paid enlisted servicemen drive the same vehicles as better paid office works do. Yet, the ‘right’ to drive nice cars is paid by the lives of servicemen on behalf of the idle chatting classes. All that the middle class is willing to pay for the same privilege is, well, lip service.

While limiting other people’s expenditures, the middle class want their own lifestyle unrestricted. If oil companies threaten to raise their prices, then the middle class threatens that the US will go to war to stop the escalating fuel prices. Send the boys to Baghdad, but not their own soft sons. There’s too much invested in their kids’ teeth, education, cars, and clothing to send them into battle.

Bless them, for they try to compensate for their total lack of self-sacrifice in the Soccer Mom semblance of a group hug. Middle class parents slap bumper stickers of the American flag to their oil consuming SUVs, despite the looming war to secure a comfortable strike price for a gallon of gas. Or they mutter with a tear threatening to crest a wobbly lower eyelid “we support our troops,’ but only when there are enough witnesses to vouch for their inspired patriotism.

What’s more aggravating than feigned support for our military are middle class mother’s inflated sense of their children’s worth. Suffering attention deficit disorders on psychotropic drugs by day, middle class kids are poor students who can’t identify America on the map, even when emblazoned with USA. The fattest, youngest generation in history, their equally fat parents are aghast at the physical demands the military requires for entrance alone. Whiny, petulant, and cloying in supermarket lines, I imagine how hours of standing at attention would shatter their fragile psyches.

Uneducated, unfit, and undisciplined, American middle class kids are unqualified for military service. Despite their failures, their mother’s scream for war abroad, insisting on sending other people’s kids to protect their weak progeny at home. Their middle class kids would fight, but they need more time at home to bolster their tentative self-esteem.

Ill prepared for war out of high school, they are less ready for life out of college. It seems a steady diet of fraternity binge drinking, term paper plagiarism, and war demonstration “die-ins” won’t suit the constitution of such delicate soldiers. I’ve heard a young, ambiguously gay guy say to a group of admiring friends, “If Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t make uniforms in camouflage, then the military’s not for me!” Despite the similarly institutional set up fraternity in-house living is to service barracks and galleys, the military’s sleeping quarters and dining facilities are cleaner and much better run.

While at boot camp, I was amazed at the superior abilities of eighteen year old seaman recruits were to their collegiate counterparts. A group of recruits ran an entire galley feeding 10,000 other recruits a meal and all without adult supervision. The instructors ate elsewhere while those assigned to facilitate feeding other sailors ran a very tight ship. There was no talking, so hand gestures were instituted. You had ten minutes to each meal once the last recruit of your division was seated. Simple instructions and menu choices were declared without ambiguity. Rules for order and hygiene were obeyed. Throughout the ‘eating evolution’ civility and good manners never wavered. These kids did an awesome job.

I contrast my experience at the galley to my dinner at Fellini’s when back from boot camp. I had dinner there with a forty year old friend. We noticed how many tattoos there were on the white men were who took food orders and made pizzas. They were inked from finger tip to finger tip in ornate designs encircling even their necks.

I have no tattoos. Nor do I have any body piercings, dreadlocks, or children out of wedlock. I may be hopeless out of fashion among my Gen X peers.

My friend told me about his father’s experience with a tattoo. His dad got a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm when he joined the Navy during WWII. He returned from the war to live a middle class life as a successful businessman in the suburbs. During work and at leisure, his dad wore long sleeve shirts to hide his tattoo. He feared having one would mark him as a member of the lower classes, limiting his success among the middle class. He urged his son not to get a tattoo in order not to bear the mark of pauper.

This same friend went to London, England during college for his studies. He saw real British punk rockers for the first time. They were addled with ink on their faces and necks that covered their entire bodies. My friend, thinking of his own father’s trouble fitting into an affluent society with his telltale tattoo, wondered about the future of the punk rockers.

He asked an English friend what these punk rock kids do about their tattoos when they apply for a job or otherwise move ahead in life. The Englishman informed my friend that these punk rock kids come from a welfare class living on the dole for many generations, that they would never get a job, and that they would never leave their community to join polite society.

My friend and I looked at the attractive, healthy, hard working white kids at Fellini’s and wondered what their future would be, ink and all. We figured in a few years, they would become investment bankers or IT professionals or fulfill other career aspirations. Perhaps tattoos are so pervasive that they are socially acceptable and no longer a badge of belligerence.

To me a tattooed kid who appears healthy, attractive, intelligent, and civil is more likely a Hope Scholarship recipient from the suburbs than a troubled child with a turbulent past. I wonder what middle class parents make of their soft, silly children adopting the hard-edged look of misery. That it’s more acceptable for pampered, affluent suburban teens to mimic the hard style of the hopelessness of a socialized welfare state than it is to sport a trim, neat style evocative of the military is astounding. That it’s more acceptable to work a thankless, low paying job in the food service industry than to make an honest living in the military where you get free education and professional training is equally abysmal.

As the white middle class kids worked the counter at Fellini’s, the real working class of Hispanic immigrants worked the kitchen. Only here does civilian life resemble military life. The working classes of lower income whites and immigrant Hispanics join the military. Despite Hispanics’ tentative use of English, they excel in the Armed Services. They outperform academically, physically, and professionally. They are exceptionally talented, hard working servicemen.

Hispanics will swell the ranks of the middle class currently occupied by lazy, ignorant, comfortable whites. The middle class complains that it’s hard to make enough money to maintain a middle class lifestyle. The lack of family values is ruining the American home. That competition from foreigners for employment and education is pushing people out of schools and out of industries. All that is true; the middle class is losing ground to ambitious minorities.

There is a correlation between the future success of those willing to join the military and the recorded failure of those unwilling to serve our country. The majority whites are the upper middle class, which include both Jews and Asians who are conspicuously absent in uniform. The majority are slipping into lower levels of economic achievement as minorities assume their place in the pantheon of American success stories. Minorities, blacks and Hispanics, are willing to work harder to enjoy fewer comforts while the white middle class majority won’t work any harder to afford luxuries they mistake for necessities.

As long as affluent parents are willing to send other people’s children into combat, but not their own kids, they will lose their ground on middle class terrain. Those sent to war shall return to oust those who used them as sacrificial lambs for the sake of achieving the American Dream. That is the nightmare we wake to when the military fights our cultural war of economic classes.