Attention ‘snowflakes’ and ‘me me me millennials’
‘‘We understand the drive they have to succeed and recognise their need for a bigger sense of purpose in a job where they can do something meaningful.’’
In a news release announcing the new recruiting campaign, which launched yesterday, the British Army said the ‘‘Your Army Needs You’’ message is the third installment of the ‘‘This is Belonging’’ series – an effort to paint to the Army as inclusive and welcoming. The first campaign, in 2017, focused on ‘‘the emotional benefit of the strong bonds experienced in the army,’’ according to the release. In 2018, the army emphasised the importance of diversity in the military.
The targeted campaign has led to an increase in army job applications for regular soldier duties, which are at a five-year high, the release said.
The army has recently struggled to reach recruiting target. The Guardian reported that it ‘‘underestimated the complexity of what it was trying to achieve’’ when it contracted army recruitment work to Capita in 2012, according to a National Audit Office report in December. Since the contract began, the army has missed all recruiting targets, the Guardian reported.
The length of the process may have contributed to a pattern of people voluntarily dropping out of the application process, the Army and Capita said in the report.
‘‘People are fundamental to the Army,’’ said Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. ‘‘The ‘Your Army needs you’ campaign is a powerful call to action that appeals to those seeking to make a difference as part of an innovative and inclusive team. It shows that time spent in the army equips people with skills for life and provides comradeship, adventure and opportunity like no other job does.’’
‘‘Now all jobs in the army are open to men and women,’’ Williamson continued. ‘‘The best just got better.’’ Past iterations of the ‘‘This is Belonging’’ recruitment campaign had drawn criticism. One retired commander said the 2018 installment, which focused on recruiting people from a diversity of genders, sexualities, faiths and ethnicities, was bowing to political correctness.
‘‘The army, like the rest of government, is being forced down a route of political correctness,’’ retired colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded British troops in Afghanistan, told BBC Breakfast, the Guardian reported. ‘‘What is most important is that the army is full of soldiers. It is of secondary importance that they reflect the composition of society.’’
The most recent campaign has received criticism, too, both for insulting millennials and for insulting the integrity of the armed forces.
A reporter for The News in Portsmouth spoke with army veterans who weren’t fond of the warm fuzzy recruiting technique. One said it was ‘‘unbelievable and embarrassing.’’ Another said it was ‘‘political correctness gone bonkers.’’
Stephen James, a former primate in the Army, asked simply: ‘‘What fresh hell is this?’’
– Washington Post The Pope has criticised bishops in the US for covering up sex abuse and indulging in ‘‘gossip and slander’’ to avoid responsibility for scandals that have damaged the Roman Catholic church.
He gave his warning in an unusual and lengthy letter to America’s bishops as they met for a prayer retreat to consider a series of abuse incidents. A conference on the crisis will be held at the Vatican next month.
The scandal in the US first emerged in Boston in 2002 but reports have continued to appear as a grand jury unearthed hundreds of cases of paedophile priests. Attention has focused on the bishops who transferred guilty priests and ignored victims. ‘‘The church’s credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes, but even more by the efforts made to deny or conceal them,’’ the Pope wrote in a letter released by the Vatican yesterday.
Winning back that credibility would require a new approach to spirituality, he wrote, ‘‘since it cannot be regained by issuing stern decrees or by simply creating new committees or improving flow charts, as if we were in charge of a department of human resources’’.
As bishops in the US have cracked down on sexual abuse by priests, conservative Catholics have fought back against accusations from Rome, claiming that the A stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird adapted by the Hollywood writer Aaron Sorkin and starring Jeff Daniels has made Broadway history by pulling in US$1.7 million (NZ$2.5m) during a week in which records were smashed by a powerful crop of plays and musicals.
Sorkin’s reworking of the famous novel into a courtroom drama that seems to speak to the racial politics of the Trump era broke the record for weekly takings for an American play on the Great White Way.
The takings still fell far short of those achieved by musicals such as Hamilton, which tend to play in larger theatres.
Hamilton also broke new ground in the week between Christmas and New Year, becoming the first show to make more than US$4 million in a week.
To Kill a Mockingbird arrives in the wake of another stage juggernaut, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which made US$2.5 million, the most brought in by any play in Broadway history.
Daniel Radcliffe, star of the Harry Potter films, was engaged on a separate stage playing a magazine fact-checker in The Lifespan of a Fact – one of four plays to gross over US$1 million.
The adaptation of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel was regarded as a particularly clever feat given the canonical status of the novel in American literature and an author’s estate that sought to halt the play with a lawsuit.
Sorkin, best known as the screenwriter behind The Social Network and A Few Good Men and the political television drama The West Wing, has said he originally thought his role would simply be to add stage directions.
In a radio interview before Christmas, he said his first draft was almost a museum piece: a homage to a story read by generations of schoolchildren.
Its producer, Scott Rudin, told him that it needed to come quickly to the trial that is the climax of the novel, pointing out that Atticus Finch, the lawyer who fights to save an innocent black man from condemnation by an all-white jury in Alabama, needed to change during the play ‘‘to become Atticus’’.
Sorkin said he returned to the text and found flaws in the character that he had originally seen as virtues when he read the story as a child.
‘‘He excuses racism all over the place,’’ Sorkin said. ‘‘He is tolerant of intolerance.’’ – The Times