DEBORAH SIMMONS: Which way our children, future armed forces?

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

This is a heads-up sorta week regarding our military. So the primary question is this: Where, when and how did we go wrong?

• A group of students at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, donned themselves in all white and plopped cone-shaped hoods over their heads for a “Christmas” skit.

• An apparently organized group of up to a dozen sailors secretly recorded female officers and midshipmen undressing, and swapped the videos.

• The GOP front-runner in the 2016 race for the White House advocates yanking the welcome mat from Muslims who want to come to the United States.

• Beginning in 2016, all military positions, including combat roles, will be open to women. Here’s how Defense Secretary Ashton Carter explained the future role of women: “People are assigned to missions, tasks, and functions according to need as well as their capabilities. And women will be subject to the same standard and rules that men will.”

None of those aforementioned newsmakers is connected, unless you fail to check the barometer of commonsense and fail to measure time.

For brevity’s sake, let’s take a short trip in the Not-So-Way-Back Machine to a time when members of the “Greatest Generation” took on Hitler and the haters during World War II. We paid homage to that generation this week as part of our Pearl Harbor anniversary. Grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers, sons, nephews and boys went to battle the haters, which included Japanese who had attacked our forces without provocation. Women mostly stayed on the home front, tending to traditional family affairs while also working farms and performing jobs that men had held before the war — even if that meant swinging a sledge hammer or joining an assembly line at an aircraft manufacturer. Women in the armed forces did not face mandatory combat duty.

We used to teach our children most of the lessons from that war.

From there, dial up the Civil Rights Era, during which another group of haters saw a pine box being built for Jim Crow, and members of the Democratic Party being disrobed for espousing racial and religious bigotry.

We taught our children some of the lessons from that civil “war.”

Unfortunately, our current crop of boys at the Military College of South Carolina either weren’t paying attention or think we weren’t. This week, officials at the school, commonly called The Citadel, began investigating students after a Snapchat post showed members of a caroling group dubbed “Ghosts of Christmas Past.”

The boys have been suspended, and the probe continues, says Citadel President John Rosa, a retired Air Force lieutenant general. “The images are not consistent with our core values of honor.”

At least not these days. A group of young men in Charleston, South Carolina, deliberately robed themselves in white clothing and covered their heads with white pointed hoods. This is the behavior of students blessed to attend an elite military college. Easily reminiscent of the KKK. The Citadel’s mission in part reads: “To educate and develop our students to become principled leaders in all walks of life.”

Ahem, “principled leaders” of what? The ringleaders of the eggheads who videotaped officers and middies undressing on the submarine USS Wyoming? It’s comforting to know six of the offenders were court-martialed. Yet it makes you wonder whether why the guilty military parties didn’t foresee the errors of their way.

Perhaps they all see themselves as future Donald Trump-like guys, someone who does and says as he sees fit.

It’s incumbent upon each of us to teach right from wrong. What’s happened, though, is that too many adults have relinquished that responsibility, and all too often it appears no one’s doing the teaching and no one’s doing the learning, either.

Even if those Citadel students were clueless about the existence of white-cone-headed Americans who called themselves the Ku Klux Klan and that the KKK was and is a white supremacist group, they know that Americans are still trying to scrub clean the bloody aftermath of the June 17 mass shooting in a Charleston church that left nine black people dead. After all, The Citadel is within marching distance of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Charleston shooting isn’t ancient history. Some folks are still so fired up that want to rewrite and erase history.

Students at Lebanon Valley College, by way of an example, are figuratively up in arms because the name Lynch is the last name of Dr. Clyde A Lynch, a former president of the school, and the name Lynch, as in “lynch mobs,” brings back hurtful memories.

What’s next? Removing the name of our attorney general, Loretta Lynch, from all official U.S. government documents?

Ahh, there’s an easy remedy for that, isn’t it?

President Obama, by way of executive decree, could force her to use her husband’s last name, which is Hargrove.

The U.S. military and America’s next generation.

The “Ghosts of Christmas Past?”

We need a do-over.

• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.