Conscription

This is part of a series of articles, notes, posts – whatever – that flow from a journey I made last summer, July/August, to Indiana, a problematic state. I write these snippets, parts of chapters, in what I am calling, The Family Munchausen. These are not overtly about the factitious disorder that shaped my young life, yet it is all intertwined isn’t it?

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The travel, on the train from Tucson, Arizona to Indiana, the driving around the Old Northwest, and the strategically planned stops along the way were part of a memoir research and autoethnographic writing fieldwork.

Last evening I showed my husband the article I wrote and posted yesterday, Butterflies. His response told me so much about his understanding of who I am and what I do. “That’s from last year isn’t it?” The generating context that travels with questions asked is essential for understanding spoken words. I didn’t quiz him on it, but embedded within his question, and how he asked it , were the questions of , “Why are you writing this NOW? A bit late isn’t it?” He does not understand my work or process.

The notes, records, and photos I captured last summer, are being processed and shaped into ethnographic records this month. This is my work. He does not recognize it as work.

He, like so many others, most people, have been captured by the capitalist, hierarchical, paradigm generated by the ruling class to believe that unless you work for someone and are paid by them you do not work and your work is just a hobby. His work and research, though it moves understanding of neurochemistry forward, is also part of what is a conscription process. This could be a treatise in and of itself, but will not be further developed here. On to the main topic.

Conscription

I just realized something about my father, Donald Eugene Hill. Injustice was a significant concern for him. Whether through farming and unions, or the conscription of Swiss high country boys by the Catholic Church in the 1500s and before, or the conscription of boys in what is now Germany by nobility to pay a debt to a British King, he rankled at the injustice of inequality and the selling or giving away of humans.

My mother’s family, the Brubaker part of it, were Amish. The Amish began in the Eastern Alps of Switzerland where The Swiss Guard conscripted from poor villages. My father’s family, Hill, Hille at that time, arrived in the New World as Hession soldiers.

A history of being stolen and enslaved has been hidden through carefully crafted language. Conscription is a type of forced servitude. Conscription in the U.S. existed in the form of the draft. Economic “hardship” that channels lower classes, castes if you will, into military service is little different from the draft.

Language hides truths by carving up injustice, calling it by another name, and changing what we perceive it to be.

This post is part of :

C is for Conscripts

April A to Z