General Discussion

Football and lifeguard. Trump got a friggin' 4 deferments! The bastid!

Now, imagine an asthma attack while running down the field or actually helping somebody at risk of going under.

Still, this president--let's call him a hypothetical president--got a deferment for asthma. And this purely hypothetical paragon of athleticism got 5 deferments. Except this wasn't a hypothetical president. Just ... one that's really inconvenient to know some facts about.

A doctor wrote a note for each athlete or there was a student waiver. Like a doctor can write a note for a 504 with consequences for a school, or for a concussion, or for all sorts of things. Don't know how many times one of my HS students were exempted from tests or work that involved a screen--and spent all the exempt time ignoring the paper review still being worked on because, well, "extended time" was necessary, but instead scrolled and texted on a cell phone.

Seriously. Goose. Gander. If what they do is bad, when "we" do the same it's no better.

If you can find advantage, you take it--that's a human thing. We all want to avoid unpleasantness, and Vietnam, for the US military, was chock-full of unpleasantness. (Full disclosure: I'm old enough and young enough to be in that donut hole where I never had to register for the draft; at the same time, my big brother volunteered for the air force in '66 because he figured his number would be called and he'd have some say about where he was placed ... He chose Air Force. But he was royally pissed when he was told he wouldn't have been drafted. Still, it (a) gave him a profitable, marketable, employable skill ... He was an airplane mechanic, meaning he also machined parts ... And it got him settled 2500 miles away from a toxic family and in a place where he met his wife and established his own.)