Today's mail brought my son, Thomas – who turned 18 earlier this month – a letter from the U.S. Selective Service System.  (When Thomas got his driver's license in Virginia well over a year ago, he was automatically, and against his will, 'registered' to become fodder for Uncle Sam's war-making machine.)  This letter came along with a card that Uncle Sam commands my son to sign and to keep.

Nothing – literally nothing – makes my blood boil more furiously than the notion that my boy is at the disposal of politicians and bureaucrats who claim the privilege of conscripting him into "service" – or of even merely reserving the 'right' to conscript him into "service."  My son is no one's slave – neither in actuality nor potentiality.