Do They Have to be Told?

Korea has a large number of American military personal. McCain often uses Korea as a model for what he would like to see Iraq become. That would be awful for some many reasons as an occupying military presence anywhere is not great. Nonetheless, they are in Korea now and, like most outposts, there is an Armed Forces Network (AFN) here. Some places only have radio stations, but since Korea has such a high force here, they also have a television station.

The shows on AFN for the most part are pretty bad. It ranges from George Lopez to soap-operas. They don't even air big US events. I'm not sure who watches it, but they gotta be out there. I don't watch it much, but when I do, I have noticed an interesting theme.

Your AFN viewing experience will include average shows (imo), long and poorly produced commercials, followed by an update on GI happenings and really bad news. The commercials are what I want to briefly discuss in this post.

For some reason, a large number of the AFN-produced commercials are literally telling soldiers that rape and sexual assualt are wrong and illegal. Besides the overwhelming frequency of these commercials (and there are many different ones floating around), I wonder why they have to be told and reminded so much that rape is wrong. Can they not figure this out?

I'm not going to bash the already very easy targets that we call US soldiers, but this seems insane to me. I'm not going to get into who rapes and why, but I will name the top offenders as a group: soldiers, athletes and social fraternity members.

The causes are vast and of course a small minority of each group actually commits the crime, but there are some common threads within those groups.

However, there are tons of commercials that offer advice to soldiers, but as I said, the advice is something that a 15 year old would need.

Here's a quick example. This is a commercial telling soldiers that they need a "wingman". Of course, a wingman usually makes sure that someone doesn't go home with an ugly man or woman. Not here. These guys need it for "adult" reasons.

I guess we all need reminders, but some things are learned with age and if you don't know those things when you reach that age, well, maybe we shouldn't have you "protecting" our interests.