The greatest lie ever told

Some would say that love is the greatest lie ever told.

What is love, really? It’s not something you can hold in your hand or touch; you can’t replicate it using scientific methods (hell, you can’t even really predict it much less make it appear when you want it to), and you certainly can’t break it down into its component parts (how do you break down perception plus brain chemistry?) so you can build it at home from a kit.

Others would say that God is the greatest lie ever told.

There’s as much evidence to support the existence of God as there is to support the idea that UFOs have landed Earth and that those landings have been kept secret by the U.S. Government, or, even less likely, a world-wide governmental conspiracy. For just about every item that a true believer of any supreme being based faith sets forth in an attempt to prove the existence of God there is an opposing scientific argument. Given that we have no idea where Homo Sapiens Sapiens actually came from (what happened, exactly, between when Homo heidelbergensis ran to escape a volcano 355,000 years ago and the appearance of Homo sapiens idaltu nearly 200,000 years later?), it makes as much sense to believe that Earth is actually a penal colony (the universe’s equivalent of Australia) for some much more advanced, space-going race as it does to believe in any creation story that involves an omnipotent creator deity.

Faced with shear number of lies we’re told throughout our lives, maybe the one I’m thinking of isn’t the greatest lie of them all, but it sure is a clever one, doing its thing right out there on prime-time network television with not a single American blinking an eye in disbelief.

No, I’m not talking about credit card rewards points and what a scam they are (Let’s see, for 40,080 points I can get a 20GB iPod as a “reward” from my Visa® card. If I get one point per dollar spent that means in order to get my “free” iPod I have to spend roughly $41,000. I might as well just pony up the $379 and pay out cash…or better yet, accumulate rewards points!). No, I’m talking about a scam that is consuming the lives of America’s youth, particularly those in poor economic circumstances. I’m talking about the idea that you can join the Army and get money for college.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

You’re a poor, but bright (enough) kid whose parents can’t afford to send you to college. The Army tells you that, depending upon the length of your enlistment, you can get as much as $70,000 to pay for college. Sounds great, right? So you enlist.

By enlisting you have signed a contract with the U.S. Army. That contract says, in very small print, that the Army can forceably reenlist you in a time of extreme national security needs (how do I know this? The Girlfriend’s niece was given a choice at the end of her National Guard hitch: voluntarily reenlist and get the $250 signing bonus, or we reenlist you by force (otherwise known as impressment) and you get nothing (can you say under the table draft, people? I think you can. Everyone together now…)).

Even if you serve out your enlistment in a time of peace and you aren’t impressed into another term of service with the military, there is nothing to say that you will actually get your college money.

The U.S. Army is an organ of the United States government. The U.S. Government has sovereign immunity from any and all civil lawsuits (unless, of course, they decide that it’s OK if you sue them), which is what a breach of contract lawsuit would be. If the Army decides, hey, you know what, we’re not going to pay you your college money after all. Thanks for the four years, kid. Hope you learned something. We hope you’ve demobilized with all your body parts and your mind intact ’cause if you haven’t, well, yeah, you might be able to get treated at a VA hospital but only if we recognize that your condition is service connected. If not, well, you’re just SOL. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

If the Army decides to pull the rug out from under you and not pay you the college money, as agreed upon when you enlisted, there is nothing you can do. You can not sue to get your money. Your contract is unenforceable.

Sure, you could go to the press but in a world where a museum exists that posits humans and dinosaurs living at the same time, and 44% of adults in the U.S. still believe that the U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn’t a mistake despite the absolute lack of WMDs, I suppose you might get some justice by exposing the military’s stunning bait-and-switch fraud. But are you really willing to bet your life on it?