結合されて私達は立つ (United We Stand)
"Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out?"
Those famous words were uttered by Rodney King after a handful of police officers brutally whipped his ass and riots broke out in Los Angeles after half of the officers were found not guilty. Back then, he was urging his fellow citizens to put down the firebombs and stop gnawing on kitties, but he could have easily been talking about the rift that exists between civilian foreigners in Okinawa and their counterparts in the military.
But why is there this great divide between military and non-military in the first place? Do we not bleed the same blood? Do we not all get discriminated against at some point in our Okinawan lives? Do we not get stared at like mutants in a petting zoo? Do people not tell us we're super totally awesomely amazing and like the best people EVAR because we can say konichiwa and use chopsticks?
I've been thinking a lot about this situation recently (blame it on all the free time I have on my hands) and I've boiled the answer down to these two things: 1) the military seems to foster an us (military peeps and their families) vs. them (civilians) mentality among its members and 2) civilians like myself seem averse to gung-ho idiots.
Ok, ok. Not everyone serving our country is a gung-ho idiot. Those are the people that are married, possibly have children, and were raised properly themselves by parents with some sense. Sadly, they're also the people that are smart enough to spend their lives on base with the occasional trip out to American Village for a sense of adventure. What does that leave us with? The young, dumb, and full of cum kids who roam the streets of Naha or Okinawa City looking for booty and drinkin' up all the hard liquor they can get their hands on. The ones that tend to be fresh out of high school with no direction in lifes, so they join the military and eventually find themselves in a tropical paradise where actions don't seem to have consequences. THey're like amplified versions of bros you'd find in a frat house at some huge state university, and I feel like there's such disdain against them (and as a result the military as a whole) by civilians because they give all of us a bad name.
One day I'd like to live in a world where the bros stop raging so hard. Where I won't see brolic dudes in Agarihama and cross my fingers that more people like them aren't coming around anytime soon. A world where dudes in camo don't look at me cross-eyed when I saw I'm an English teacher. Let us put our differences aside, bury the proverbial hatchet, and bring forth a new era of united foreigner-ness!!!