This will be my first blog posted as a response to a page posted in the media. I posted first as a comment within the site itself, but I thought that for proper archiving I would put the same post here. You can find the full opinion article at the following URL:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/12/20/greene.wartime.christmas.sacrifice/index.html
After reading that, if you haven’t already, my thoughts will be shown below the line-break.
________________________________________
I hope I understand this article correctly. I believe that it effectively tells me that I couldn’t care less about the troops, and this writer is entitled to his opinion, but I at least want to be sure why this and some comment-posters would say I don’t support the troops.
1) I don’t read maps of troop movements in the paper. Didn’t Geraldo get in trouble for that gaffe back in the initial invasion of Iraq because he gave away troop placements, activities and intentions on international television? The guys that our troops are fighting can simply stream a broadcast or check a newspaper’s website online and hear what the troops are doing if the reporting was that focused and delivered content daily. I see why, for the troops’ safety, this information is not released to the public, and I’m certain that the military itself would want to highly limit how much information gets out through the news, but apparently that this news is not on the front page every day in perpetuity, I’m to blame.
2) It’s also my fault that following World War 2 and moving into the Korean War, the United States has never slowed down. We’re in a permanent war-time economy. There’s no such thing as an “arms race” anymore because we have contractors, the U.S. has permanent funds set aside in the national defense budget every year — for decades now — to pay people to build the weapons and armaments and vehicles necessary to mount a war effort, and to make and package the food, and to supply the tents and sleeping bags and brick and mortar for FOLs and everything that you would need to mount a war effort. I get that there was sacrificing for rubber and sugar and grease, I get that the government had to order the manufacturing industry to re-purpose in order to build up the war machine, but that’s just not the case today. What exactly would I be required to sacrifice, exactly? Nobody’s really giving any clearly explained plan for how I can prove my concern the same as the generations before me based on the situations that exist today. But I get it, that’s my fault too.
3) In the past, there wasn’t a day gone by where the war wasn’t on everybody’s minds. There’s no problem there. President Bush and Obama both stated that, effectively, the United States fights overseas so that we don’t have to fight the enemy within our own country. That actually makes me think back, since I didn’t live in the first half of the century or even much of the second half — although I did pay attention in history class — and a good amount of the war propaganda in the Veteran and Boomer generations that I remember seeing wasn’t just based on a moral imperative to save our European brothers… it was about the enemy already being at the gates. Communism, socialist sleeper cells, Japanese spies, air raid drills… part of the culture of “shared sacrifice” in the past was the idea that one could die at any minute because the country would get bombed by an invading military force from another nation’s full war machine. It was easier, then, I would say, to keep the war in mind all the time when you couldn’t be sure that some other country wasn’t going to be sending their air-force to blanket the sky with bombs. But the fact that the troops are largely fighting terrorists and insurgents who couldn’t possibly mount that kind of war effort at my front door in rural America… that, too, is my fault.
I come from a military family. I didn’t serve myself, due to a general cowardice when it comes to getting shot at; I’ll admit that. I donated to military charities in the past before I became unemployed, and I kept track of developments with the wars as best I could. What, short of serving myself, can I actually do that would qualify as “caring” to a sufficient level?
I always roll my eyes and shake my head at these kinds of discussion, because to me it always seems to dance on that very thin line separating “Being a good person” and “I’m more patriotic than you.”
0 Responses to “What Is Shared Sacrifice?”