Gary Ghirardi / NNOMY - What began for the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth as an adjustment of our phone forwarding from an answering machine to a cell phone, revealed a bit of a surprise for our office this month of October 2020. What resulted were five phone calls within seven days of both young men and women seeking counseling on how to get out of the Delayed Entry program for military service that they had initially signed up for. All said that they had changed their minds; one for family issues being needed at home to help his mom during this difficult time of Covid. The other young men just did not want to go any longer with no explanation. Two young women, both more nervous than the men discussing such a decision with an unknown entity on the other end of a phone number they gathered from our website.

It became apparent that there were youth that were finding their way to the NNOMY DEP pages from searching Google for “Getting Out of the Delayed Entry Program.”  NNOMY's “Getting Out” page is in our top 20 most popular web pages with 42,308  hits registering on NNOMY.org and the same article on our blog page, NNOMYpeace.net, registering 37,580 hits. The more generic DEP description page ranks number one most visited on both sites with 149,924 hits and 147,242 respectively. Getting Out on the NNOMY.org site comes up first on my Google search and fifth on the Bing search engine of the Microsoft Explorer browser. All our pages that refer to DEP have links to better places to call than us like the GI Rights Hotline or the Military Law Task Force but we still seem to be getting some calls as a result of the phone forwarding. We have put additional information on our DEP pages to make certain that those who wish to get out of DEP, can feel free to call, indicating we will put them in contact with a GI Rights counselor since this past week's experience of receiving calls .

 
Fabiola Cardozo / NNOMY /  español  - It’s widely recognized that the Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly affects the economy and, as a result, also negatively affects healthcare, education, and culture. However, in the face of hard times like the ones we’ve experienced this year, national priorities are oriented through the policies implemented by political leaders.

A recent article by the Washington Post highlights how The Pentagon diverted taxpayer money originally meant for masks and cotton swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor.

"The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s intent.

 The payments were made even though U.S. health officials think major funding gaps in pandemic response still remain. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. Many U.S. hospitals still face a severe shortage of N95 masks. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address."

"It's important that our youth understand that joining the military isn't the only way to pay for college or find stability in life."

Eoin Higgins / Commondreams -

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday proposed blocking the military from recruiting in schools, describing the practice as a predatory attack on disadvantaged children who already suffer from underfunded resources in their learning environments. 

The proposal follows an amendment to the defense spending bill from Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, last week that would ban military recruiters from using video game streaming platforms to reach impressionable young people.