At least some of these presentations **DO** get prepared at a local level. I know because I've seen it — though from my experience, I've seen them get prepared by senior NCOs close to retirement who have been selected because they can “speak their minds” without worrying about career reprisals, or more rarely by mid-level officers, typically captains or majors.
I've seen good presentations and bad ones. Some really good ones included a briefing by a Japanese American World War II vet who was so angry at Japan after Pearl Harbor that he ended up making the US Army his career, and a speech by a retired black senior officer, a Vietnam vet, who talked about how he was so angry with the perception that “black soldiers won't fight” during the Vietnam War that he made a point of being the toughest soldier he could be during multiple tours in Vietnam so people wouldn't be able to say bad things about “black cowards” in uniform.
And then there have been some others which were a lot worse.
Yes, there are a lot of brainwashed idiots in America and some of them join the military. But I hope one lesson that the “politically correct crowd” takes out of this incident is that when they do bad things, they have a whole audience of uniformed people watching who may sit quietly and listen politely and then get copies and distribute them.
My personal view is that I've seen far less real racism in and around military installations than in the civilian world. That's a good thing for the military — having objective standards for performance and a culture of personal and group discipline is much easier to implement in the military than in many civilian career fields.
If people can accept the principle that the only colors which matter are “red, white, and blue,” I'm fine with that.
I know because I've seen it — though from my experience, I've seen them get prepared by senior NCOs close to retirement who have been selected because they can “speak their minds” without worrying about career reprisals, or more rarely by mid-level officers, typically captains or majors.
Now that I'm up at the strategic level Army, we have dedicated people for this task of briefing and generally handling EO stuff. Seems like a GROSS waste of manpower to me, but the Army doesn't give a s**t what I think anyway. In my Infantry days, it was usually the most un-PC NCO we had who got tasked to be the company EO rep--it was practically a joke, but a joke that had to be taken seriously regardless, which made it even more head-shaking in its incongruity.
If people can accept the principle that the only colors which matter are “red, white, and blue,” I'm fine with that.
I wish that was so, but it isn't. PC has its hooks in the military (especially the Army) good and deep. It's all small groups of special interests and skin colors and (now) sexual orientations.
I once held to the idea that we were all green, but I've seen first-hand how that is NOT the case. Hell, I had a (black, female, VERY entitled) major in my ROTC program outright say that's not the case.
The worst EO briefing I ever had to attend in the USNR was presented by a junior enlisted African immigrant with a thick accent that was very had to understand. It was standard multi-cultural tripe.