Oddly, these exercises left me with a distinct distaste for parades of all kinds, but especially the "amateur" events of civilians.
Yeah? I
love military parades, though as an adult I lough about the amount of seriousness brought towards them by some people. I must also confess that lads wearing a marine or infantry uniforms are my weak point - you might laugh at me (or not). A parade can only be a greate success, when participants enjoy the happening and flirt with spectators in some way or other. When I was very young, we had to wear uniforms at school, in the scout camps and on parades (yes, there were few). Out of my foolishness I was even a platoon leader at several ocassions, but was replaced soon by a guy with more regular pace.
We also had some military lessons at older age - from 15 upwards, if memory serves. This was wicked - the military teacher was an old moron from the "old school" and he didn't understand fun at all. At every lesson he insisted to make first a control of our handkerchiefs (to be white and ironed), and of our finger-nails (them in no way to be farnished, dirty or too long). This took up to 15 minutes, as everybody caught on lacking smugnes was basted and forced to explain his misdeeds - a problem for girls with colored long nails or for boys who just have had a little fight in the mud on the school court. Luckily, I always had a handkerchief with me and didn't come on the idea to furnish my nails red. The remains of the lesson we were mostly listening some adventurous stories from the war in Afghanistan, China border-rippings or the WWII battles.
That's why, despite of my addiction to uniforms and their wearers, I dislike the idea of the wrongly understood military discipline. If the Gay State shall happen to be established within our live spans, the army should be professional and based on skills, not on despotry and drill.
But a small palace guard in neat uniforms isn't really a waste of public money, is it?