Blake Martin Andrews – Page 5

Digging through trash: why student volunteers help with composting

By Spenser Hickey

News Editor

Twice a week, a small group of students gather in Hamilton-Williams Campus Center by the mailroom, and walk through a maze of hallways to the garage. These students put on a pair of thin gloves and dig through trash bags of food scraps, dirty plates and cups and spilled soda and condiments, occasionally finding flies or maggots living in the bags. Several of them do this weekly work; only two of them are paid – a stipend of $250 a semester each for their overall work, regardless of the hours.

Even if they weren’t paid, they’d still do it.

“We’re doing it anyways and it’s just an incentive,” said senior Erika Kazi, one of two composting interns working with Chartwells dining services.

According to Gene Castelli, senior director of Dining Services, composting is part of a cycle in which leftover food is divided into what is compostable and is then sent to a mulch facility. The mulch is then sold at a high discount back to the university for use in the student garden; Chartwells then buys the produce at market price from the garden.

“To me sustainability isn’t only about saving stuff,” he said. “It’s about coming to a 360 process and that’s probably the best.”

Sending food to be composted turns it into organic matter for plant growth, according to Kazi, an environmental studies major.

“Carbon is trapped in the soil and that can be used by plants to grow,” she said explaining that, in a landfill, the food would rot and carbon dioxide would be released into the atmosphere.

Each week, they usually sort through “20 to 30 bags of compost” according to Kazi and separate out two to three bags of garbage and one to two of recycled goods.

Sophomore Ellen Hughes, the other composting intern, was offered the position because she’d worked sorting through compost last year; like Kazi she would be doing it even without the stipend.

“I would be doing it anyway, so it’s just sweet that I’m being paid for it now,” she said.

A lot of their work comes from non-compostable items being placed in the bins by mistake; part of the interns’ job is to design signs listing what is and is not compostable.

“If there is more than five percent of contamination, which is non-compostable items, in the compost, (the University) gets fined for it,” Hughes said.

Kazi said two weeks ago the compost bins were picked up earlier than expected, before any students could sort out the waste, and the university would have been fined $100 if there were the 5 percent of contamination.

Hughes said she digs through the compost as a way to clear her head if she’s having a bad day.

“You’re digging through this gross bag of trash and junk and maggots, really gross smells, ketchup, all this stuff…even though what’s left in the bag is really gross, you’re taking out all the trash,” she said. “…What you have left in the bag is pure compost, which will be made into soil which can feed plants and create gardens.

As gross as it is, I kind of enjoy it, because its just really rewarding because when you finish you’re feeling kind of gross but you can shower and wash your hands and you’re like, ‘yeah, I just created a bag of compost.’”

Sophomore Cecilia Smith started composting recently and has only done it twice but said she’ll probably do it regularly.

“I heard about it through the (Environment and Wildlife) club, which I am a part of,” Smith said. “Both Erika and Ellen have sent out emails and mentioned it during meetings.”

She said she thinks composting is worth it because it diverts waste that would otherwise go to a landfill and helps provide for the student garden.

“Overall, I do the composting because I want to do my part and I value sustainability and taking care of the environment,” Smith said. “By sorting through the compost, I’m doing something tangible to realize these ideals.”

Freshman Olivia Lease, another composting volunteer, said that composting can help add nutrients, while traditional waste products can negatively affect the soil and animals.

“The production of plastic, Styrofoam and other man-made materials has a great negative impact on the environment,” she said. “We burn fossil fuels to help power the factories that produce these materials. So producing these things contributes to the rise in carbon emissions and further disrupts the Earth’s climate system.”

Many of the participants said that their biggest challenge is consistently finding the wrong items in the bags meant for compost; they’ve even found metal silverware among the compost on occasion.

Smith, though, said that sorting through compost has taught her about some of the intricacies of what is and is not compostable. For example, paper Coke cups are compostable, but the plastic lids and straws often left on them when they’re thrown away aren’t.

“You have to pay attention to the little things because they can add up in both percentage of contamination and in someone else’s time in trying to get everything out completely,” she said.

“Everyone can increase sustainability by taking part in the little things that count,” added Lease. “Everyday things like recycling whenever possible and composting.”

Freshman Cindy Hastings said that she thought the issue was that students weren’t aware what was and wasn’t compostable, rather than deliberate throwing non-compostable items in the bins.

“When composting this year was first started up, we found around 50 pizza boxes (which are not compostable) in the compost bags,” she said. “Signs were then put up that the pizza boxes belonged in the trash, and this past week we only found a few in the compost.”

Hughes, though, was less optimistic about the success of the signs.

“There was definitely a lot more (non-compostable items in the compost bins) at the start of the year, honestly I haven’t noticed a huge, huge improvement,” she said. “It kind of fluctuates, some weeks it’ll be really great and some weeks it’ll be terrible, so it’s hard to tell if it’s actually getting better.”

SlutWalk may be postponed, but it will happen

By Spenser Hickey

News Editor

This editorial was meant to be an appeal to the campus community, particularly men, to take part in SlutWalk, which was planned for this evening.

Sadly, as I sat down to write it, though, I received an email from the Sisters United cabinet saying that the event had been postponed until October.

While we may not be marching tonight, the message of the event—speaking out about sexual violence and survivor-blaming—is still very important.

The article on Pages 1 and 2 about the Delhi rape case provides a clear picture of what these societal ills can cause if they go unchecked and unchanged.

This is not just a problem with India, but an international problem that affects almost all if not all nations. During the violent upheavals in Egypt, there were reports of hundreds of sexual assaults against women at the demonstrations. There were the extremely violent gang rapes that occurred in India and Brazil, and here we had the case of Stuebenville, as well as reports of shocking mishandling of sexual assault cases by colleges around the nation.

And yet these cases are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sexual violence. The vast majority of cases never see this kind of attention, and they can affect both women and men, survivors and the family and friends of survivors.

We can all be hurt by sexual assault and all have a stake in speaking out against it, and that is one of the messages of SlutWalk.

The college campus environment, sadly, is one of the most prominent sites of sexual violence in America today. Colleges often lack adequate services to prevent assaults, punish assailants, or support survivors.

The measures used to prevent sexual violence also often include warnings about unattended drinks, not walking home alone or taking self-defense classes.

While these can prevent sexual assault in the short term, to really address the problem in the long term we the conversation should be about consent and teaching men (overwhelming the offenders) not to rape. That’s what SlutWalk is about.

We may not be walking tonight, but we will take this time to improve the event and spread the word. The march will take place in October. I hope to see you there.

Students to re-enact Trail of Tears

By Spenser Hickey

News Editor

This map shows the route of the Trail of Tears, which Native Americans were forced to walk when the United States government evicted them from their sovereign territories.

“School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man’s greed,” said retired private John G. Burnett in 1890, in reference to the forced removal of five Native American nations during the 1830s.

In the Trail of Tears, as it came to be known, the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations were driven from their lands by the American military, despite a Supreme Court ruling preventing it. Burnett was one of the soldiers pressed into service to lead the Cherokee to Oklahoma.

This October, junior Felicia Rose will lead students in a reenactment of the event at Camp Joy in Clarksville, Ohio, as part of her Theory-to-Practice (TiPiT) grant titled “Leading and Learning Through Diversity.”

“I’m very interested in history and the way it can influence our actions,” she said.
Since her freshman year, Rose has worked with Terree Stevenson, director of Multicultural Student Affairs, to plan the grant and the events. She led students in a similar re-enactment event last fall as part of the project, exploring the experiences of slaves on the Underground Railroad.

“It’s important to learn about American history and learn as much from it as you can,” Rose said. “With this activity students get an interactive, once-in-a-lifetime experience that they weren’t looking for. It’s informative and allows students to interact and learn from new people.”

She and Stevenson plan to get as many students involved as possible, but said she would love to have “around 20” students involved, twice the number of participants as the Underground Railroad event.

Junior Jeunesse Jacobs participated in the Underground Railroad re-enactment and said she’d love to take part in the Trail of Tears event.

She said the Underground Railroad re-enactment was “a great experience” and very eye-opening.

“My biggest take away from this was that not just the African-Americans had something to be scared of, so did those who choose to help them, and that it took a very brave person to take that chance of being killed if they got caught,” Jacobs said in an email.

She said her experience as an African-American in the re-enactment motivated her not to take things for granted and be grateful for all her opportunities.

“People fought long and hard so that we can have the freedom that we have today,” Jacobs said.

Freshman Brittiany Andears said she heard about the program in the OWU Daily and plans to take part in the Trail of Tears re-enactment event.

Andears said that such events are important because they provide “a new view” on the Native American experience.

Students participating will leave OWU around noon on Oct. 26 and return the night of Oct. 27. According to Rose, the program’s details are kept secret to surprise participants.

During the Trail of Tears, forcibly relocated Native Americans had to walk over a thousand miles, from southern states such as Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama to their government-designated homes in Oklahoma.

It is unclear how many Native Americans died during the marches ordered by President Andrew Jackson. Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” gives some information from contemporary news accounts of deaths from specific incidents, but does not list an overall total. Even before they began marching, Zinn writes, nations were moved from their homes into stockade camps where hundreds died of starvation.

In “The New Nation,” part of her 10-volume series “A History of US,” Joy Hakim said one in four Cherokees who started out died because of exhaustion, starvation and the elements.

Russell Thornton’s “Ethnohistory” estimates that as many as 8,000 Cherokee died in the marches; but the lack of population records for Native Americans makes it hard to be certain.

Much of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native American groups during the 1800s meets the United Nations’ criteria for genocide.

The UN defines genocide as “acts such as deliberately inflicting conditions of life aimed at destroying a national, racial, ethnic or religious group and forcibly transferring children of that group to another group, when these acts have the intent of destroying that group, partially or completely.”

According to Alan Taylor’s “American Colonies,” the indigenous population of North and South America dwindled from 50 million in 1490, two years before Columbus’s arrival, to 1.8 million in 1890, the date of the Wounded Knee massacre, the last major conflict between the U.S. government and Native Americans.

About Today: Looking Back 12 Years

This 9/11 Memorial honors two OWU alumni who died in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The local fire station flies their flag at half mast to honor the lives lost in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

By Spenser Hickey

News Editor

The physical signs on campus may have been few, but the grim weight of memory still sat heavy on us all.

Around campus, things were different today. The JAYWalk seemed quieter, and the time between classes seemed longer; the day as a whole seemed more drawn out, offering added time to reflect and look back on that morning, 12 years ago.

There were some reminders – not that we needed them. One student wore an NYPD shirt; another had one with the New York City skyline; the flag at the fire station on the aptly named Liberty Street hung at half-mast. I never heard anyone say what had happened verbally, but we all knew.

In what has become a memorial custom of our modern age, many took to social media to offer their reflections and commemorations for the lives lost that day; one student mourned her father, while another posted that he was pulling an all-nighter in Beeghly for the first time since the night US Special Forces killed Osama Bin Ladin.

Ohio Wesleyan was not spared by this tragic attack on America – Douglas Cherry, Class of 1985; Edward Luckett, Class of 1984; and Ann Judge, Class of 1973 were among the 2,977 victims.

They have been honored with a memorial rock and garden on the academic side, but this year there were no special services, or university-wide commemorations of the lives lost among the OWU community. Twelve years is a long time, and eventually the yearly memorials and moments of silence end.

But even without these traditional rites, even if no one brings the day up in conversation, the pall remains, as it always will. This day was the Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination of our generation, and the memories – where we were, how we found out – will never fade. That day affected all of us, not just those who live in and around New York, or Washington, or Shanksville, PA.

Since that day we have witnessed one successful terror attack at home and many more abroad, as well as a number of failed ones, and fought and ended two wars, waged in the name of those killed, and sent military troops around the world as part of an ongoing global war. Last night, the President made the case for another foreign intervention in the Middle East.

Today – or at least this piece about today – is not the place to discuss whether the war in Syria is right or wrong, or if the NSA should have the power it does, or if surveillance by federal and police authorities of the Muslim-American community has overstepped the bounds of civil rights; I mention these as ways we as a nation and a society have been affected by the tragedy.

We have become more fearful, more patriotic, more aware of global issues. The day and the years that followed changed us, changed our culture, as shows like 24 and Homeland played up our fear of terrorist infiltration and our trust in renegade government agents willing to do whatever was necessary, regardless of if it was legal.

America was at war, and when sacrifices were needed we rose to the occasion, whether as first responders on the day, or soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines in the wars that followed; we showed the world and ourselves the depth of our resolve, as we did again after the Boston Marathon, as we may have to again.

As the day winds down and we go on with our lives, let us take some time to remember the 2,977 men and women who stepped from this earth into the arms of our national memory.

In what remains of today, and on the day next year, and the year after that, take some time to remember them, and those they left behind who will never forget, because of the events of that day – this day, 12 years ago.

Compassion is crucial in Zimmerman verdict’s wake

By Spenser Hickey

News Editor

In light of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, I am reminded of an episode of the TV series “The West Wing.”

A Latino LAPD officer shot and killed a black teenager holding what turned out to be a fake gun, and one of the characters — a Latino presidential candidate — speaks to a black church congregation about the incident; I’ve included some of his words below.

I find myself on days like this casting about for someone to blame. I blame the kid, he stole a car. I blame the parents. Why couldn’t they teach him better? I blame the cop, did he need to fire? I blame every one I can think of and I am filled with rage.

And then I try and find compassion. Compassion for the people I blame, compassion for the people I do not understand, compassion. It doesn’t always work so well. I remember as a young man listening on the radio to Dr. King in 1968. He asked of us compassion, and we responded, not necessarily because we felt it but because he convinced us that if we could find compassion, if we could express compassion, that if we could just pretend compassion, it would heal us so much more than vengeance could. And he was right: it did but not enough. What we’ve learned this week is that more compassion is required of us and an even greater effort is required of us.

… I ask you today to dig down deep with me and find that compassion in your hearts, because it will keep us on the road. And we will walk together, and work together. And slowly, slowly, too slowly, things will get better.

To be fair, the similar details between the fictional case and the real-life tragedy of Trayvon Martin are superficial at best: a Hispanic man shoots and kills a black youth he thought was a threat to his life. Details aside, though, the message of the speech — compassion and the need for unity — still resonate at this dark hour.

Much of the national debate over the case centered on blame — what happened was Zimmerman’s fault for being a profiling wannabe cop; or, alternatively, Martin was a violent and possibly high punk who instigated the fight.

While I’m personally more inclined to see more validity to the first assertion than the second one — and I admit I hadn’t watched all of the trial’s nonstop coverage — the case was more than just two competing assertions.

Why did Zimmerman think Martin was suspicious? As far as I know, he hasn’t spoken to this, and many have asserted he was assuming Trayvon was a criminal because of his appearance — a black teen in a hoodie. The details of the altercation that left Trayvon dead and Zimmerman apparently bloodied were fiercely contested, but even if Martin did start the fight, as Zimmerman claims, I can appreciate why he would have done so.

Thinking of this reminds me of a time, not too long ago, when I was walking late at night and saw an unknown man following me, as Trayvon did that tragic night. It was the last night of fall semester, and I was with several friends going up the JAYwalk when we saw someone trying to pry open the doors to the Hamilton-Williams Campus Center. He saw us, stopped, and began to follow us. We grouped together, called Public Safety. He vanished as soon as they showed up, and that was the end of it.

I had the safety of numbers, and as a white man did not have a deeply ingrained and often justified mistrust of police, as many black men do. And yet I still remember the fear and adrenaline I felt that night, and how I became conscious of the glass bottle I held, and thought of how I might have had to use it had I been alone, had PS been elsewhere. And so even if Trayvon were the instigator of the fight, I have an understanding of why he would have done so, not knowing who this man was — Zimmerman had been following him for awhile, first in a vehicle and then on foot.

I don’t know why George Zimmerman did what he did, and I likely never will; none of us know what was in his mind as he approached Martin. And because the case is so muddled, I’m not surprised there was an acquittal. After all, the only man who saw everything and is still alive was the one on trial.

Despite the acquittal, I still see in this case some progress in how racially-charged killings are handled.

Had this happened several decades ago, Zimmerman would almost certainly have gone untried, and Trayvon Martin would be just one of the scores of black men who never had a chance at receiving justice.

Look at the cases of Emmett Till, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Medgar Evers and the dozens of other martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. All were killed, either by members of the Klu Kulx Klan or police (or both), who were acquitted despite clear evidence of their guilt and of their racist motives.

In the Zimmerman trial — where the motive and evidence is nowhere near as cut-and-dry, but very muddled and disputed — the trial represented a legitimate attempt at prosecution, even if it was deeply contentious.

And so, I think back to the speech from “The West Wing,” and how relevant the lines on blame are; they could easily be adapted to fit this real tragedy. We can blame George Zimmerman for following Trayvon Martin; we can blame Trayvon Martin for starting the fight – if he did indeed do that – and we can blame George Zimmerman for shooting to kill. But blame will not bring Trayvon Martin back, and it will further divide us and may lead to even more violence, which none of us want.

I also think of the lines on compassion, and how it is my own community who needs to show compassion now, especially those of us who think that Zimmerman should have been acquitted, that the claims of racism were overblown.

Regardless of what we think of the specific details of this one case, all of us must, show compassion and solidarity for the black community, as they mourn the tragic loss of another one of their sons, and feel justice was withheld. They still struggle for equality, and we should support them.

My heart goes out to the Martin family and the black community, especially as I remember that this trial is not the sole example of racial strife present in today’s America.

There are many other issues that need to be acknowledged, but the coverage of the trial has pushed them out of the national consciousness.

The Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act, and now southern states rush to pass voter identification laws once blocked for being too discriminatory.

Urban police departments are defending their stop and frisk tactics, and people of color are much more likely to be convicted and incarcerated longer than whites accused of similar offenses.

The North Carolina NAACP has had to return to civil disobedience and stand-ins in their Moral Mondays protests; just in the past few weeks, there were reports of KKK fliers being distributed in several states.

These are just some of the more prominent examples of racial discord that continues to plague our nation.

Have we come a long way? Certainly.

But have we come far enough? Certainly not.

Veterans denied justice by a broken system

By Spenser Hickey

News Editor

Since World War II, as many as 1,000,000 men and women have gone into the service, eager to serve their country, only to be sexually assaulted by their comrades. Most never reported it and only a very few that did saw their assailant be convicted and thrown out of the service.

The number of military sexual assault survivors is greater than that of servicemen and women killed in action in every conflict the U.S. has taken part in—combined.

According to recent testimony by Marine Commandant James Amos, 85 to 90 percent of sexual assaults remain unreported in today’s military, despite twelve months of efforts by the top brass to effect change.

Now, after so many decades, Congress is planning legislation to fight the problem, either by putting control of sexual assault cases at the highest levels of military authority (as Ohio Rep. Mike Turner’s bill advocates) or removing it from the military’s control all together (what Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is calling for).

Under the current system, an officer in charge of the case can change the verdict on a whim, even without being present at the trial, because the alleged rapist is a husband and father, and it’s thought they don’t do that sort of thing. It’s happened.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with any system that tries to handle sexual assault cases in-house — it creates a recipe for potential injustice. Look at the Catholic Church or Penn State; look at the allegations of failures in reporting and violations of survivors’ rights at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill or Dartmouth College.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have balked at Gillibrand’s call for sexual assault cases to be overseen by civilian prosecutors, saying it would undermine unit discipline and trust.

“The role of the commander should remain central,” said U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey. “Our goal should be to hold commanders more accountable, not render them less able to help us correct the crisis. The commanders’ responsibility to preserve order and discipline is essential to effecting change.”

But it’s not essential, though, as several nations have proven.

In the militaries of England, Canada, Australia, Germany and Israel, for example, unit commanders do not have control over sexual assault cases, and their militaries aren’t falling apart.

When asked about the methods foreign militaries use to combat sexual assault, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said they’d “look into it,” so maybe that’s why they’re convinced commanders need to retain their control — they aren’t actually aware there are other systems that actually work better.

Military commanders have frequently claimed social change is a threat to unit discipline and order in response to government pressure, whether it was for racial integration, allowing women to serve in active duty or overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And now it’s being marched out again, hopefully to the same lack of success as in the past.

While congressmen and women from both parties have been united in their pressure on military officials to carry out effective changes, one took the opportunity to put his foot in his mouth and make one more misguided statement about the causes of rape.

“The hormone level created by nature sets in place the possibility for these types of things to occur,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), in a statement that bumbled him into the realm of Todd Akin and so many other politicians — from both parties — who have made callous or misguided remarks about sexual assault.

While his statement was slammed in the media, conservative news site RedState posted a strong defense of Chambliss’s remark, claiming “the liberal media” was deliberately ignoring the context of the statement, and that the context excuses it.

The whole six-and-a-half-minute speech Chambliss gave, the “context” RedState offers, has nothing to do with hormones, but with how the military has failed to create an environment that makes men too afraid to commit rape; instead they’ve created an environment that explicitly or implicitly permits it.

But then Chambliss made his claim, wholly unrelated to the speech he just made, that it’s the natural hormones that make this possible.

As RedState writer Erick Erickson puts it in his defending piece, it’s because 17-23 year old men are “horny” and a commander was “encouraging soldiers to hook up on base as much as possible” — and when these base impulses are added that to a broken system of reporting and prosecution, rapes are going to happen.

(Side note: if Erickson’s name is familiar, it’s because he, along with Lou Dobbs, recently lost a heated on-air debate on gender roles and sexism with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly — and I doubt he’s learned much from it.)

Here’s the thing though, Sen. Chambliss and Mr. Erickson — hormones, as you put it, are “natural.” That means we all have them — so if all the men in the military have these hormones and many are in these systems where they can get away with rape, why don’t they all do it? And why are some of the alleged rapists outside that 17 to 23 age range?

Chambliss’s and Erickson’s statements presume that if a young man is in a room with a woman he’s physically attracted to, and there’s little chance of punishment involved, he’ll have sex with her whether she wants to or not, because the hormones take over.

It’s a disgusting premise for us young men, that we all have some repressed rapist on our shoulders; and it’s one that completely ignores the gender dynamics of rape survivors in the military (more men have been raped than women, according to DoD estimates) and the more common reasons most rapes occur in the military.

As with any crime, the motives behind these rapes differ from case to case, but “natural hormones” are one of the least common factors. Military sexual assault, like prison rape — another systemic failure of reporting and justice — is primarily a crime of predation and power rather than passion, targeting the people offenders see as weaker and subjecting them to what they consider to be the worst humiliation.

It’s not about sexual desire, but establishing and reinforcing power and control, and sadly the military already has a power-based hierarchal system that is being exploited by sexual predators who target their subordinates in the ranks.

In addition, rape — often against women and children — has been one of the oldest weapons militaries use against their enemy’s populations to further subjugate them and weaken their morale. It’s seen in ongoing regional wars around the world; in the invasions of the Germans, Soviets and Japanese in World War II; and in hundreds of other conflicts going back to before ancient Rome and Greece. War and sexual violence have been entwined since the first groups of humanity took up arms against their neighbors.

In the case of our current military, I see some of these assaults as a violent physical expression of a broader attitude infecting the services — that women are weak and good only for sexual subjugation. It’s part of a last-ditch effort to keep the military exclusive to men, and sexual assaults are an unseen salvo in this mostly undeclared war.

When it’s not directly about power, it’s because men think they have a right to use women or men for their own sexual gratification, regardless of their wishes. While Chambliss’s solution — that the military stop rape by making men fear the consequences too much do it — might work sometimes, it’s still not the right solution.

Instead, the military, and our entire society, need to teach men to treat people with respect and dignity, and to value the consent of their partner. That’s how we take back the military and end the invisible war.

But enough of Chambliss, Erickson and their wildly off-kilter perspectives on the causes of rape, which thankfully have been slammed by politicians on the left and right — let’s look at something else in this debate, something favorable a politician said.

“I cannot overstate my disgust and disappointment over continued reports of sexual misconduct in our military,” said Arizona Senator John McCain, a Navy veteran. “We’ve been talking about this issue for years and talk is insufficient.”

He recently said that he could no longer recommend to women in his constituency that they join the military, due to the rampant sexual assaults.

It’s a bold move for a politician to tell citizens not to join the military, and I applaud McCain for doing so. But he missed one particular statistic about rape in the military: over half of survivors are men, not women.

It’s not that surprising, when you consider that there are six times more men than women in the military; and men are less likely to report assaults than women, due to the aggressive hypermasculinity of military culture, which portrays being assaulted as the ultimate weakness in an environment where power is paramount. Like I said, this is about power, not passion.

“The biggest reasons men don’t come forward (with sex assault reports) are the fear of retaliation (from fellow troops), the fear of being viewed in a weaker light and the fact there are very few, if any, services for male survivors,” said Brian Lewis, a Navy veteran and rape survivor, in an NBC News interview.

In light of this, I’d say everyone, regardless of gender, should think about the risks before enlisting in the military. I know I won’t enlist as long as the problem continues. Not just because of the danger, but because I refuse to be part of an institution where rape is an occupation hazard.

That’s not hyperbole, not a slick phrase I made up — it’s an actual judge’s words, based the number and frequency of assaults, from a 2011 lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.

“If they actually had systems of accountability that prosecuted and imprisoned perpetrators, you would get rid of the rapes right away,” said attorney Susan Burke, who represented the plaintiffs — 28 veterans who were raped during their military service — in the 2011 lawsuit.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say a new system would end rapes entirely – it should be based off the civilian criminal justice system, and sexual violence is still a serious issue outside of the military. But it would certainly be better.

The current system has failed most veterans who turned to it at every step of the way.

It’s failed at preventing assaults; it’s failed at offering comfortable reporting of them; it’s failed at prosecuting assault cases; it’s failed at punishing those convicted in accordance with their crime; and it’s failed at treating survivors’ mental and physical scars as a result of their military sexual trauma.

The civilian criminal system is not without its flaws — look at the absurdly lenient sentences of the Steubenville rapists, or the grotesque case of the Central Park Five (teenagers of color wrongly convicted in the 1989 rape of a white woman).

But it’s still an improvement over the current military system, and it’s long past time for the military brass to swallow their pride and adopt a new system – or for the government to compel them to do so through legislative mandate.

Each day last year, an average of 38 men and 33 women in our armed forces were sexually assaulted by those they served with.

They’d each made the noblest choice an American can make — stepping up to risk their lives in our defense.

I’m hard-pressed to think how their commanders, as well as our collective response to the problem, could have let them down more.

For an in-depth view into this crisis, watch “The Invisible War,” available on Netflix Instant.