Word: sss
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SSS worked in strange and wondrous ways. It was arbitrary, erratic, and unpredictable. The disposition of thousands of lives was enigmatic, inscrutable for mere mortals. You heard directly contradicting cases of IVF qualifications, of C.O. is won and lost, of prosecution of resisters. The moods of your board-members, the weather on the day your case came up the length of your hair, and most important. you finances were all factors that played on your draft situation. You couldn't know anything until they came to your case...
Despite what the SSS would have us believe, you still can't. All the variable will still have their influence. The new lottery, m???. Nixon, eliminates all kinds of irregularities. It rectifies elitism and discrimination in favor of the rich and the students...
...lottery. Nixon says, gives us a good indication of our chances for induction. Ever concerned with our psychic well-being the SSS has "reduced" to one year our liability and has tipped its hand on how badly it wants us. But the fine print effectively destroys any new sense of security. Any board can proceed as far down the date-ranking as it chooses. And if you do manage to escape your year of prime liability, you are shuffled into a "secondary pool" of eligible I-A's until age 26 (35 if you've held a student deferment since...
...lottery ushered in at least one change, if only an impressionistic one. It has nothing to do with the policies of conscription or resistance. The SSS has pushed their denial of our human autonomy to the logical extreme by ranking us as numbers in what is clearly a Game. The United States is now using the same method to decide the future of human beings that the Rotary Club used to pick winners of color T.V's. that the B'nai B'rith uses to name sponsors of trees in Israel...
...college as well as the student, the issue of the war has finally been brought home--if not by radicals, then at least by the SSS. Students who are concerned about occupational choice cannot fail to see the sacrifice of academic freedom. Finally college administrations, if their concern is education rather than simply the supply of "more effective human beings," cannot fail to see the sacrifice of academic goals...