All my kids (I think) played Little League in Louisiana. It was in the mid to late-nineties that one of them came home from his last game with a foot or taller trophy. I know his team was not in the running for winning, placing, or showing, what was it for? “Oh everyone got one.” He was delighted, and why shouldn’t he have been? Neither of his brothers even when winning divisions or tournaments had come home was something this big. I neither encouraged or dissed the “award”.
Fast forward thirty year. His age group is running the public school system – at least at the individual school level. I walk by the a elementary Pflugerville Independent School District (PFSID) school digital message board. (When we first in Austin (1999) arrived this school district had on all their busses, maintenance vehicles, and uniforms, PISD. Now don’t you think that years earlier someone would have advised switching to PFISD, as they much later did?)
As I said, I walk by this PFISD elementary school every day. Their digital message board switches from award to award to award: Teacher of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Lunchroom Workers Day, Bus Drivers Day, Janitor Appreciation Day, and many more. You see? The everyone gets a trophy generation has come of age, and they are carrying on the long (30+ years) tradition of everyone’s a winner; it’s all win-win, and there is absolutely no elitism.[i]
Why does this matter? Circa 2019 a young woman was in Divine Service. She was in what the U.S. Army of the 80s and 90s called BDU (Battle Dress Uniform) but is now called ACU (Army Combat Uniform). I could see she was in the U.S. Army and that she was a First Lieutenant. I couldn’t find her branch insignia. She said, “I’ve been in the Army since 2008 and I’ve never heard of a branch insignia.” Blown away I repeated this anecdote to Bible Class the next Sunday. One of those present had been an Army officer in Vietnam. He expressed the same astonishment as I. Why on earth, how on earth could they do that?
I can’t imagine they took away the chaplains’ branch insignia, but if they had what would fellow soldiers think I was? I wore the Ranger Tab and the Airborne Wings. You’d naturally think I was some sort of combat arms (The guys who do the fighting.). You wouldn’t assume I was a chaplain, but if you took my opinion, as if I was an infantry officer, lives would be endangered if not lost.
I asked a West Point grad from about 2014 or so about this loss of branch. He said, “They did away with that years ago.” I asked why, and he said, “It was elitism.” You see Combat Arms, that’s Infantry, Armor, Field Artillery, Special Forces, when I was in were the “real” soldiers; the ones who did the fighting. They stood out and to some extent acted-out with attitude. When the West Pointer told me that I remembered that sometime in the 80s or maybe 90s the Army did away with Ranger Units only wearing a black beret and made it Army-wide. Why? Because of that ugly ism, elitism.
I don’t know about you but I want elite doctors, lawyers, teachers, carpenters, plumbers, auto mechanics, ad infinitum. I don’t want middle of the road any of those things, but right now the only thing you can have that is elite is people who play sports. We still want elite players even down to the Little League level even if we do still give them all trophies. But most of all I want elite soldiers, sailors, airmen, and special forces.
In the First Gulf War, we were warned of the Iraq’s “elite” that was the word they used, Republican Guard. They turned out not so much. I wonder, I have no way of knowing, if Russia, China, and/or Iran truly has elite troops. Now Christians can always find comfort in Jeremiah 37:10, in a obverse way, The prophets says to Judea and King Zedekiah, “‘For even if you had defeated the entire army of Chaldeans who were fighting against you, and there were only wounded men left among them, each man in his tent, they would rise up and burn this city with fire.'”
However, generally speaking (The Battle of the Bulge is probably anexception.), elite troops defeat ordinary or even well-trained ones. And in war if your side does get the participation award, it means you bring home the most body bags.[ii]
[i] Notice how quickly the public school system embraces the popular and faddish. Mao Zedong divided the bourgeoisie, that he thought he would have to cooperate with before a full turn to communism, into three categories. The third was: “Petty bourgeoisie: owner-peasants, master handicraftsmen, student, primary and middle school teachers, etc. …” This group you didn’t need to be concerned with convincing them to join the revolution because “as soon as the dawn of the victory is discernible”, they will join the revolution. In this regard he was not a bad prophet” (Mehnert, Klaus, Peking and Moscow, 1963, 153).
[ii] My writing doesn’t keep up with my reading. Read the 1994 book by a liberal Democrat, In Defense of Elitism. I had not read this when I wrote the above. He foretold all of what has happened, and like many a prophet before him he died the following year. Let this quote whet your appetite: “We have taken the legal notion that all men are created equal to its illogical extreme, seeking not just equality of justice in courts but equality of outcomes in almost every field of endeavor [PRH: This is DEI]” (13). Further, on this same page, he shows his liberal bona fides as well as understanding of egalitarianism gone wrong. “When the reprehensible James Watt was sacked as President Regan’s interior secretary, he was not being punished for pillaging public lands to benefit private commercial interests, nor for despoiling the wilderness, nor for permitting the Environmental Protection Agency to devolve into a criminal organization, although he could have been charged with all these failings. He was ousted for daring to say of a panel he had recruited, ‘We’ve got a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple – and we’ve got quality.’ He had violated the unwritten code, quotas, [were] then [supposed to be] presented as the yield of a purely talent-based search.”
