Unfortunately, I was only able to access the Herrick half of the reading this evening, but from that, the section that stood out the most to me was “Rhetoric Builds Community.” It was all about how how people form communities by how they describe themselves and others, etc… One sentence in particular grabbed my attention: “Often members of a community–examples might include feminists, Orthodox Jews, or animal rights activists– do not know all of the other member’s of their community personally.” This ability to identify with others from a far has obvious upsides, from identifying strangers on the internet as “on your side,” to making friends in new places. What may not have been considered are it’s potentially hilarious side effects. Just because people have the ability to identify communities by their rhetoric from afar, doesn’t mean they’ll always get it right. They might assume that they are in fact part of community that they really have little to do with.

This happens almost every day at VMI. Cadets assume that because they attend a “military institute,” that they are part of the larger “military community.” This is especially apparent on Facebook, where cadets (most egregiously, the non-commissioning kind like myself) will share posts from veteran pages and blogs that imply that because they understand (kind of) the jokes, or the issues at play, that they are part of the veteran community.  It makes me snort every time I see it. Because, with the exception of a select few, and these few are almost never the ones who make these posts, cadets have only “played army,” most haven’t even been to their first round of “real” training yet. ROTC and the Rat Line, do not trained killers make. The cadets who make these posts are well intentioned. They care about the career path they aspire to. But they are still in the aspirational phase. Knowing some of the rhetoric and freezing in the woods four days a year isn’t a magic pass into this “military community.” It would probably be best to wait till they are actually commissioned before posting items from the veterans community online. Just so they don’t potentially embarrass themselves.