On not being the “target audience”

When I first enlisted in the Army, the going was rough, as one expects. The idea is to get the enlistee accustomed to functioning under the high levels of stress that may be encountered in combat. To my mind, there is nothing inherently strange or wrong about that.

In my case, it wasn’t the physical training that got me down — though I was sore every night and got shin splints. It wasn’t having to pull fire guard for two hours during the night, then having to wake up early, even though that was pretty crappy. It wasn’t not being able to communicate with family members, because who cares. For me, the difficulties were the lack of autonomy, and the overwhelming sense that we had all done something very, very wrong and THAT was why we spent all day being screamed at. It was the group punishment. Above everything else, it was the lying.

They lie to you a lot.

Basic was tough, but doable. Basic is, I think, where they send most of the better Drill Sergeants since the introduction to military life is so important. AIT — I’ll spare you a lengthy explanation and just say this was medic school — was far worse.

I’d say a good 5 of our 8 cadre didn’t want to be there. One woman was an alcoholic that took her bad family life out on us by popping up drunk in the bay in the middle of the night and smoking us (making us exercise). The group punishment, like in Basic, was supposed to end after a few weeks but lasted the entire course. I cannot convey to you how infuriating I find being knowingly punished for things I cannot, in my wildest dreams, have any influence over whatsoever.

The thing that got me was being picked on by the cadre. It started when I showed up the first night; I got off the bus alone, and three drills rolled up on me and started screaming in my face, ordering contradictory exercises. This sort of thing went on for a while into the course. I was small, quiet, female. Mostly, I had short hair and this made the cadre angry, despite it being perfectly within regulations. And then, I made perfect grades in class despite, frankly, falling asleep in them often because this here motherfucker has sleep problems.

I was “mophead”, “high speed” (sarcastically; it is a term used to describe an ambitious or particularly skilled soldier). And, you know, I’d like to say I’m above being stressed out by adult men and women picking on me, but I’m not. It’s not even the educational kind of stress, it’s the kind that makes you want to leave because you have been well-assured that you are not a good culture fit for the Army. I was so tired of being childishly harassed by adults, punished for shit I had nothing to do with, and being forced to stand in pointless, silent formations of more than an hour’s duration — just to take up our time — that I was going to purposefully fail my next three exams in order to get the fuck out of there. Despite having few to no real options in the outside world, I was getting desperate. I knew where I was not wanted.

I was standing in one of those pointless formations, looking around at everyone else — many of them like me, kids struggling to find a way out of poverty and some kind of direction to their shiftless lives. And in that moment, fuck if I know why, it struck me that it wasn’t possible for the Army to provide individualized training to maximize the potential of every one of these people. Even with our massive defense budget, there are simply too many learning styles; too many family backgrounds. So, the Army optimizes.

The Army provides training that will best benefit the largest number of soldiers.
Inevitably, this means some are not well-served. Some are even horribly served by the teaching techniques and the culture.

One could call this tailoring your instruction to the lowest common denominator — and in a sense, it was, because it assumed we absolutely could not be trusted to behave or obey orders without being pre-emptively shouted at, and then hovered over the entire time we were engaged. Army training assumes a lot of not-very-nice things about its enlistees, but unfortunately, it is doing so because they believe this is the most effective approach.

So, what does one do when they fall within the group of people who aren’t well-served by the culture? You can get mad, and I think a lot of people do. You can try to leave. For me, the realization was a comfort. Knowing that the training wasn’t exactly “meant for me” helped me accept it, because it was no longer about me. It was about most of everyone else. It was about a system. I believe it is better for the Army to effectively train 10 people, than it is to effectively train one and the other 10 go AWOL.

I still got picked on, though that tapered off. Nothing about the training or culture changed, but just having the insight was enough to keep me going. I felt better.

I’ve long since left the military, but that lesson stuck with me because it’s so broadly applicable. I’ve recently realized that it also seems to apply to crafting messages in politics. What I mean is this — I am frequently confronted with political statements wherein I agree with the core idea, or the intent, but find the implementation profoundly aggravating.

For example, when Bryce Williams, a black man, shot a white reporter and cameraman, there were a number of tweets professing sympathy for the family of the shooter, some with the tag #blacklivesmatter. When conservatives on Twitter and elsewhere confronted “liberal twitter” with these, the response was that all such tweets were clearly made by 4chan or Reddit trolls. This assertion is troubling for a number of reasons; one, it assumes #blacklivesmatter to be both a monolith and perfect in judgment, despite being made up of normal human beings; two, it’s a No True Scotsman fallacy; and three, it assumes the audience is incapable of the kind of BARELY nuanced thinking required to say, “yes, well, even a morally good movement can include people whose understanding of the movement I disagree with.” In short, much like Army training, it assumes you are an idiot who requires all instruction conveyed to you in absolutely black and white terms. This is deeply irritating, not just because it doesn’t work on me, but because it makes me feel like a majority of the people I purportedly agree with are blatantly dishonest. Makes me dislike the culture.

The longer I spectate, the more likely it seems that this messaging — the vast majority of messaging, really — is not “for me”. I’m just not the target audience.

This is not as easy of a lesson to accept about politics, as it was in regard to Army training. I can accept that maybe my fellow soldiers need a heavy hand without feeling like TOO big of a jerk.

When it comes to crafting the party line, I have to question what “the messaging I find infuriatingly lacking in nuance/honesty is the most effective strategy”, means. It means either that those cultivating the messaging BELIEVE the audience is incapable of processing nuance/doesn’t like nuance/isn’t inspired by it, or that regardless of the messenger’s belief, these assessments are true.

That definitely makes me feel like a jerk, because there’s this implication that somehow I am such a cool guy who can work with gray areas, whereas the people being targeted, are not — and if I respected not being down with nuance, I wouldn’t be mad about this whole thing in the first place, right? So I’m left with this other implication that the majority of people I share a band of the political spectrum with are not paying attention, or are just parrots, or adamantly refuse to believe that worthy social issues are anything but clean-cut. And, of course, if this applies to liberals, it also applies to conservatives, and well, shit, there is no reason it wouldn’t apply to just about everyone, which is… sad, at best.

So I’m going to continue working through this in hopes that I can find a satisfactory answer that does not sound so superior.

Originally published at heysawbones.tumblr.com.