My spin on a dust-up with Bill O’Reilly - Don’t miss point of teen protest: military preys on poor and middle-class students

In case you missed the airing Thursday night, I’ll say that, by most accounts, the dust-up was a tie. O’Reilly was not quite the gentleman he should be given his conservative stance, but he also wasn’t quite the bully I’d expected. Part of me thinks that deep down, he really agrees with us.

But television is entertainment, and there wasn’t quite the space in the milliseconds that O’Reilly allowed — while he was breathing between rants — to cover the finer points. It seems to me that the issue we’ve all skipped around in this story is the one no one likes to admit: that our military preys on poor and middle-class students. Military recruiters do target high schools in less affluent neighborhoods, where they think students might be willing to barter their future in order to pay for college later.

That was partly the reason the 25 students staged a sit-in at the Morton West cafeteria on Nov. 1.”*

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