The Warring Generation

It seems like ours is the warring generation.  Not terribly long after we were legally allowed to call ourselves adults, we ended up with an actual war, and then the old bastards who ignored the intelligence that lead us to be attacked on 9/11/01, resulting in that war, picked us another fight not even two years later, and without the first fight done yet. 

Some of us are old enough to run for public office now, and a few have even been elected, but these wars are still going on, mostly because the same old bastards who sent us there in the first place can't seem to find it within themselves to admit defeat, call it good, and let the dying stop.  Some of them would even like to pick us more fights.  Apparently, it wasn't enough to spend our 20's and 30's dealing with some old guys' war. We also need to hand this thing down to our kids.  I have a kid just nine years from military age (eight with my signature, which I'd give her if she asked).  If we let these people give us another war, judging by how these things have gone recently, our kids, most of whom who weren't even born when all this began, will be fighting it. 

Think about how weird that must be for them, to have never lived in a world that was at peace, to have never watched the news and not seen reports of US troops dying.  Boy, we 80's kids sure had it good.  I remember Desert Storm.  I was in third grade, and a guy in my class had a brother in the Navy.  We sent him care packages and letters, and he came to see us when he got home a few months later.  He didn't have to go back to the Persian Gulf ever again after he came home.  By and large, Desert Storm was a blip on the radar screen of the American public, and it was over as quickly as it began. As a kid growing up in the US, with the exception of Desert Storm, I never had to think about war.  War was that thing that happened when my parents were in college, that thing that people yelled about in the streets, and that the big black wall I saw on my 4th grade field trip to Washington DC was in commemoration of.  War was not a part of my life until I was a Private in the Army, and the 9/11 attacks happened. 

Our kids don't have that luxury.  Erin, at the age of 9, knows what it's like for her dad to go into a combat zone for 12-15 months at a time, and to do it over and over again, with absolutely no end in sight.  She knows that some kids' daddies don't make it home, and that there are bad guys who would like nothing more than to see her daddy, and all the others, dead. (Thanks, kid in Erin's class for telling her that during Thak's third tour. There's one downside to DoD schools for you.) She knows what it's like for every bad thing on the news to directly affect our family, and for the longest time, thought that every time the president gave a speech, it meant her dad would be getting orders to leave again.  She knows what the casualty notification car looks like, and what Taps means, and why MRAPS are sloped on the bottom (to deflect shrapnel, because the bad guys like to plant bombs in the dirt). This is stuff that kids should never know, but it's stuff that our kids inevitably do know, because they have never known a world without war.

We have to do something about this.  Really, is this what a privileged upbringing in peacetime gives?  People who vote overwhelmingly conservative, because they had it so good that they don't think they have to help anybody, and who grew up in peace, so they take wars lightly?  Is this what we have come to?  That's crazy.  We can't do this.  Our country is falling apart, and honestly, it's getting to the point where we can't just blame the old guys anymore.  They're dying off, retiring, moving on.  More and more, the responsibility is shifting to our own, and people, most of us are really blowing it.

Now, in addition to the wars we have off shore, we have wars with each other.  Most of my Army buddies are Republican.  Most of my Army buddies are also male. When I talk about how detrimental the GOP platform on healthcare and women's issues really is to every American woman, I can see that they do not care.  To them, the GOP is who gave them better pay raises as soldiers, and who they trust to give them better benefits from the VA now.  Understandably, they trust them to take care of our brothers and sisters who are still fighting, and us who are done fighting.

Unfortunately, that's pitting them, and those like them, against the interests of like half the population, which is playing right into the GOP's hands.  The problem is that any perceived benefit that the GOP gives to veterans (which really isn't greater than what the Democrats give us) is handily outweighed by the fact that their policies on women's issues could literally kill people, our very own American people, and that it would be totally preventable, but illegal to prevent.  That's scary.  These people have proposed policies that could literally cause my death, or that of any other woman, under certain circumstances.  While I once wrote the metaphorical check to the US for any amount, up to and including my life, and regret nothing about that, I refuse to die of something stupid (like an ectopic pregnancy) because some asshole Republican said that a fertilized egg deserves more rights to life than me, a full fledged citizen of the nation. I cannot be the only one who sees the ridiculousness of that line of thought.  The war on women is very real, and if these Republicans have their way about it, there will be casualties, and not just in the way of rights.

Add to that, there is a major struggle going on between classes.  The GOP has become basically the strong arm of the richest people in our nation.  The Democrats and the smaller parties more closely represent the interests of us common folks who don't have millions of dollars to our names. The problem is that not everyone sees that.  Some people are lured by the GOP's values platform, or supposed support of the military, and really, by voting that way, they've signed themselves up to be pawns of the rich, just as much as everybody who enlisted after the invasion of Iraq.  Class warfare is real, and just like the insurgent warfare we all know so well, there is no front line and no rear echelon.  We're all in it just as much as the next guy.

You know, I remember this one cadence we used to sing in Airborne School at Ft. Benning, as we'd run to our training areas each day.  It started out "One, two, three, four, hey. Somebody, anybody start a war, hey." I thought it was a catchy tune.  We all did.  Most of us thought it sounded cool to go to war.  We thought it would be noble, valorous, and exciting.  Now, a decade later, all of us, whether we went to those wars or not, know that literal wars are anything but exciting, and that while some of the people involved may be noble or valorous, the situation itself couldn't be farther from it.  The problem is that too many of these same people don't recognize that our wars, and any causes that people may believe are associated with them, are not more justified by waging more wars, and that the wars on our own soil are just as important and just as costly as the ones overseas. 

It also bears mentioning that the people who have consciously avoided the literal wars that our country has waged have every bit of responsibility to get in on the right side of these cultural wars here at home.  Even though you may not be female, even though you may be somewhat well off, you can surely see how wrong it is for the elite to simply wield power over facets of people's lives where they don't belong, and to act on the belief that corporations are people, and to do all the other heinous things they would love to do.  Surely, any rational person can see how harmful this can be to society at large, and to a majority of individuals.

I hope that our generation will find peace.  I hope that one day, we'll move past this chapter in our history, and that for once, we'll learn from it.  For now, to move us closer to that point, it is everybody's responsibility to see our current political situation for what it is, and to think not only of yourself, but of what kind of world you want your children to remember growing up in.  They have seen too much war already.  Can't we bring the peace now?